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India had to curtail 2.3 terawatt hours (TWh) of solar generation between late May and December 2025, a development that indicates the power system’s requirements for a high-renewables future.
A report by Ember also reveals that flexibility improvement must keep pace with solar power capacity growth considering that the total recorded curtailment is equivalent to roughly 18 per cent of the average monthly solar generation of about 13 TWh.
While 2025 marked a surge in solar capacity additions in India, it also regularly saw curtailment of solar power as an emergency measure to ensure grid stability, the energy think tank’s report pointed out.
It reveals that India had to curtail 2.3 terawatt hours (TWh) of solar generation between late May, when reporting started and December 2025, for which between ₹575 and ₹690 crore (around $63-76 million) had to be paid in compensation through emergency Tertiary Reserve Ancillary Service (TRAS) mechanisms, it added.
A massive 38 gigawatt (GW) solar power capacity was added in 2025. Yet, curtailment of RE emerged as a key theme of the year, driven by transmission constraints and grid security concerns through emergency measures, Ember noted.
In many ways, such curtailment defeats the very purpose of building this capacity. Ruchita Shah, Energy Analyst at Ember, explained that “While grid security-related curtailment in 2025 may not be a major concern in isolation, as it was largely triggered by lower-than-expected demand, it served as a real-world stress test for a high-solar future. It highlighted a fundamental reality: clean energy cannot scale efficiently without flexibility,” she added.
Sharing a similar view, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Chairman of Hexa Climate, pointed out that the root cause is a velocity mismatch—generation grows at 24 per cent while transmission lags at 6 per cent.
“Distributed generation simply cannot match the scale needed for heavy industry. To fix this, we don’t need new targets; we need the infrastructure of execution that is faster corridors and storage to finally connect our resource hubs to our industrial engines. Without fixing this, India’s energy transition risks fragmenting into inefficient regional silos,” he emphasised.
The curtailment occurred, under frequently occurring operational conditions, as the National Load Dispatch Centre (NLDC) could not turn down other generation sources far enough to accommodate midday solar power.
These conditions occurred, for example, when demand was lower than forecast, a common occurrence in 2025 due to exceptionally mild temperatures, the think tank pointed out.
Demand fell in October 2025, with the midday fall twice that in the evening. In these cases, even after ramping down the coal fleet to its minimum technical limits, the system operator had to curtail solar generation to ensure the grid remained stable.
Ember argued that 2025 is an indicator of the power system’s requirements for a high-renewables future, and shows that Indian flexibility improvement must keep pace with solar capacity growth.
It identifies that India is already taking steps in this direction, and recommends a three-level strategy, implemented in the near to mid term to increase flexibility.
First, ensuring that other generating assets are capable of turning up or down when there is high renewable generation. Second, building more storage assets to store excess renewable energy for times of higher demand. Finally, shifting non-critical demand to periods of high renewable availability as another key step to prepare for the future.
Published on January 31, 2026
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