ahore is back to counting hours and minutes. Recent reporting says urban areas in LESCO’s service territory have been seeing 3 to 4 hours of daily load shedding. Some reports put urban cuts at up to 8 hours and rural Punjab at 12 to 16 hours.

Gas supply has not been any kinder: the SNGPL announced a schedule for the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with brief, fixed supply windows a day. Residents in several areas have complained of low pressure and shorter cooking time.

For the common Lahori this is not an abstract story about an industry. It begins at home where breakfast gets delayed, the tea goes cold and the fan is not something you switch on without thinking. Even the simplest routine needs a backup plan. These outages enter the day and rearrange it, irreverent to the life you’re living. A family that depends on gas for cooking and electricity for everything else has to keep adjusting its life around a supply system that keeps slipping away.

The financial cost is heavier than most people understand, or perhaps admit aloud. Every outage pushes households towards a private solution; and private solutions are expensive. A UPS, inverter AC, battery, generator, solar panel; even just the extra usage during prime hours becomes added monthly burden. Reuters reports that Pakistanis have increasingly turned to alternative power supplies and that solar adoption has surged because of outages and tariff pressure. That may look like resilience from a distance, but up close it is a class divide. The people who can pay buy their way out of the grid problem; the people who cannot, stay in.

With the caveat that there is no reason to romanticise this issue, there is a flip side to it. Outages are disruptive and unfair, but they have forced a kind of practical resilience. Families cook together in narrow gas windows, neighbours share extension cords, and local electricians, battery sellers and solar installers are seeing steady work. In some cases, this shift is also nudging people towards alternatives like electric bikes for short commutes, which could have long-term environmental benefits, including lower emissions and possibly a weaker smog season in the years ahead. It is not a solution, but it is still a way people are holding the day together.

Time poverty is especially cruel. It steals from the poor first, because they have the least room to absorb delay, spoilage or missed work. That is why the outages feel bigger than the power they take away. They cut into earnings, dignity and routine at the same time. 

There is also the hidden economy of this crisis. A shop loses customers when the lights go off; a tandoor slows down when gas pressure drops. A work-from-home employee loses hours; a student loses concentration. A family somewhere loses food from the fridge due to spoilage. All this is where the shortage becomes social more than technical. It spreads into ‘time poverty’ — that is, being forced to spend hours on things that should be simple.

Time poverty is especially cruel. It steals from the poor first, because they have the least room to absorb delay, spoilage or missed work. That is why these outages feel bigger than the power they take away. They cut into earnings, dignity and routine at the same time.

Lahore has lived through this kind of thing before, which is exactly why the present crisis might feel familiar, especially to Gen Z and older generations. Pakistan has had long stretches of load shedding for years. In January 2023 a nationwide grid failure left millions without electricity for more than 12 hours in many places. The difference now is that the crisis has a new shape.

In April 2026, the power minister said Pakistan faced a shortfall of around 3,400 MW as LNG-fired plants were producing only about 500 MW out of roughly 6,000 MW capacity. Outages, he said, were being driven by reduced hydropower, disrupted LNG imports and the way rooftop solar shifts pressure into the evening peak. The government keeps saying it wants no unscheduled outages. The Power Division has told distributors to share feeder-wise schedules so consumers know what is coming.

On paper, what might sound like control, people on the ground describe it as unannounced cuts. That gap matters. It tells us the problem is more about public trust in governmental institutions and politicians’ claims. When a city no longer believes the system will behave predictably, every outage becomes part of a larger civic failure.

What lies ahead looks mixed; and that is putting it politely. According to Reuters, Lahore could be among the major hubs next year where rooftop solar generation exceeds daytime grid demand. That sounds like a win until you remember what happens after sunset. The evening still comes. The fan still needs power. The kitchen still needs gas. So unless storage, transmission, pricing and planning improve together, Lahore may end up with a split energy life: one rhythm for those who can afford independence, another for everyone else.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer