Peak and Off-Peak Electricity in Pakistan — When Power Costs More, and How to Shift Around It

Time-of-use (ToU) billing charges a higher rate during a defined peak window and a lower rate the rest of the day. In Pakistan it is compulsory for industrial and larger commercial connections at 5 kW sanctioned load and above, so most factories and commercial sites are already on it. The peak window is a roughly three-to-four-hour block in the evening; the remaining ~20 hours are off-peak.

Most people carry a fixed idea of peak hours in their head — a single evening window that never changes. It does change: the window moves with the season and differs between distribution companies, so a mental rule set once is wrong for much of the year. WattEY aligns to the actual seasonal window (following PITC reality) rather than a generic assumption.

That matters because the whole point of knowing your peak is to move load out of it. Shift a flexible load into the wrong hours — because you assumed the wrong window — and you can pay more, not less.

It is worth being precise about what you can and cannot do here. Pakistan runs a single-buyer electricity market (only now transitioning toward competitive trading), so utility-style “demand response” — where a market pays you to curtail — is not really on the table; that model belongs to liberalised markets. The honest, available lever is behind-the-meter load-shifting: running flexible loads (pumps, cooling, heavy machinery, charging) in off-peak hours and out of the peak window.

Solar makes this sharper, not softer. The evening peak is exactly when solar output is fading, so the peak window is when you are most exposed to expensive grid power. Maximising self-consumption during the day and shifting what you can out of the evening peak is the combined play.

WattEY applies the correct seasonal time-of-use window automatically and shows your consumption split into peak and off-peak — by shift, so you can see which activity is running when power is most expensive. That visibility is the first half of the lever; the second is acting on it, which WattEY’s Smart Transfer Switch (STS) and load automation address by switching flexible loads around the window.

The framing stays honest: WattEY shows you the peak and helps you move controllable load out of it. It doesn’t change your tariff, and it isn’t a demand-response scheme.