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Five rejoinders: What Ramachandra Guha gets wrong about Rahul Gandhi
Why India is not able to fully use the solar power it generates
In this speculative memoir, an academic writes about chronic pain and liminal spaces she exists in
Ramachandra Guha: How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power
The Muslim maestro at the heart of a Hindu temple tradition
Why Delhi University’s four-year undergraduate programme has left students in panic
Fraternity and caste society: The prospects and risks of a Madras High Court order
Before the 21st century’s climate grief, there was Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s 1939 novel Aranyak’
Rush Hour: Delhi fire leaves 21 dead, Indian killed in attack on Kuwait airport and more
Hindusthan Records: How the shepherd boy playing a flute brought music into Indian homes
At 3.30 in the afternoon on May 21, India registered its highest-ever power demand, of more than 270 GW.
It was a day when most of north, west and central India was seeing heatwaves, during which power demand typically spikes as millions of people use cooling devices simultaneously. While coal-based thermal power met almost 63% of the demand during the peak, solar power was the next biggest contributor, and supplied 28% of all power that was consumed.
Data from that day suggests its contribution could have been higher. Across the day, India generated around 10 gigawatt-hours less solar energy than it had capacity to, according to the daily report by Grid India, which operates the country’s power system. The data traces this unused capacity specifically to facilities in Gujarat and Rajasthan.
A key problem in this regard is insufficient transmission capacity – transmission lines are needed to evacuate power from generation plants. Typically, solar power capacity goes untapped because “the solar plant might not have enough capacity to evacuate the power to the nearest node”, explained Sunil Dahiya, founder and lead analyst at Envirocatalysts, a Delhi-based think-tank that works on environment and climate.
While India has added significant solar capacity in recent years, it has not built adequate transmission infrastructure required to move power from generation plants to the demand hotspots. When there is “more supply in the grid than can be evacuated, operators are asked to limit the generation to maintain grid stability”, Dahiya said.
Tracking the power demand and supply through that day reveals another problem in the generation of power from solar energy.
As the day wore on, the demand dipped slightly, then rose again after 7 pm, reaching 250 GW by 11 pm. During this second peak, however, there was no solar power to feed the demand – in fact, by 7.30 pm, after sunset, the contribution of solar power to the electricity grid fell to zero and coal-based thermal power took over entirely.
This need not have been the case. In many countries, solar power is available round the clock since it is stored in battery energy storage systems.
But India faces the twin limitations of inadequate transmission infrastructure and a lack of battery energy storage systems – as a result, the country’s solar power capacity is not being fully used.
In the first quarter of this year, a massive 78 GWh of renewable energy, of which most, 72 GWh, was solar, was curtailed.
The trend continued as summer arrived. On April 2, for instance, around 5.09 GWh of solar power capacity was not used in Gujarat “in view of system requirement and grid security and stability”. Similarly, on May 12, 2.16 GWh went unutilised in Rajasthan for the same reason.
With millions of Indians facing power cuts during heat waves this summer, experts say it is important to speedily build the systems needed to fully utilise the country’s solar generation capacity, particularly since India has ambitious targets to add more capacity in the coming years. India’s current installed solar capacity is 150 GW. It plans to take this to 300 GW by 2030.
While a solar plant can be built within six months to a year, adding a transmission line can take up to 30 months, said Dahiya. The gap could lead to more power capacity being wasted. “This can be reduced by battery storage, not only to meet the slower pace of transmission lines, but also to meet the night-time peaks,” he said.
India’s transmission infrastructure is falling short of targets. In 2024-’25, 42% of the planned lines of inter-state transmission systems, or ISTS, were not built on time.
According to a report by global energy think-tank Ember, one in four inter-state transmission systems stand delayed by a year or more.
“With ISTS projects, getting right of way is a challenge, especially when such transmission lines pass through several states and need negotiations with multiple actors,” said Duttatreya Das, Energy Analyst-Asia at Ember. A key challenge is “fragmented land ownership”, according to the report.
Experts also point to a lack of adequate planning. “Since renewable projects come at a much faster pace, project developers have not done that kind of planning in advance about how this renewable energy capacity would be evacuated,” said Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
The Ember report highlights that solar projects “enter a pipeline” without “general network access” – or permission to use the transmission network.
Earlier, such permission was granted by the Central Transmission Utility, after a solar project had signed contracts to sell power to specific buyers. Since 2022, this process has been made easier and projects can now seek and gain network access even before they have locked in buyers.
But as the Ember report points out, many solar projects fail to seek network access in a timely manner, and are able to evacuate power only when the network has spare capacity.
Das explained that when renewable energy plants come up without adequate infrastructure of transmission lines, the developers worry about the money they stand to lose on account of wasted capacity. “It becomes like a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “If the current bottlenecks continue developers will shy away from aggressively deploying solar capacity.”
Experts say that transmission bottlenecks are more difficult to solve than low storage capacity. Therefore, they say, India could focus primarily on creating battery energy storage systems, or BESS, which can supply power at night when no solar energy is generated.
A report by the Bengaluru think-tank Climate Risk Horizons that focused on Rajasthan noted that if an 8-hour battery storage system with a capacity of around 2 GW was installed along with solar panels that generated around 7 GW, together the system could supply up to 18 hours of renewable energy per day. Such systems could help “manage peak demand, reduce reliance on thermal power for balancing, and enhance overall grid reliability”, the report said.
Moreover, it could also make renewable energy available at a much cheaper cost. “The costs of renewable energy will definitely be at par or lesser than the lowest-costing coal,” said Ember’s Das.
However, India has been slow to create battery energy storage systems. Between 2022 and May 2025, India auctioned around 13 gigawatt-hours of BESS capacity. As of August 2025, only about 219 megawatt-hours of capacity were “reported to be operational”, a study by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found.
Garg observed that a key reason for this shortfall could be that the prices at which companies bid to set up battery capacity “were not commercially viable”. The report by her institute noted that players were bidding at lower prices which may become unviable later during implementation, and “can jeopardise the successful commissioning of projects.”
Garg added, “While competition is good, auctions might not be the best for BESS. There is a need to revisit the process.”
Further, BESS projects have also seen delays in the signing of power purchase agreements with distribution utilities. Like power generation plants, battery energy storage systems also sell power to distribution utilities, which are typically state-owned firms that sell power to consumers. But the utilities “expect further price reductions in a rapidly evolving competitive market”, an IEEFA report suggested.
Recognising the importance of battery storage systems, the government has been pushing for solar projects to incorporate them at the inception stage itself.
In February 2025, the ministry of power issued an advisory to states to “incorporate a minimum of 2-hour co-located energy storage systems equivalent to 10% of the installed solar project capacity in future solar tenders”.
But this will need a strong policy push, experts observed. “A majority of transmission lines are built by the government but batteries are not. It is market driven,” said Dahiya. In contrast to advisories, he added, “At this point there is no strict regulation of exactly how much capacity should be. There needs to be stricter push for battery storage in all upcoming solar.”
Garg, however, cautioned that there is a need to look beyond lithium-ion batteries, for which India is dependent on imports from China, to other battery technologies, such as sodium-ion batteries, which have longer life spans and lower exposure to supply chain risks. “The supply chains of these face risk with global disruptions,” she said.
There are other pathways to solving the problem of unused solar capacity, she pointed out. For instance, she explained, renewable energy projects that are not linked to transmission lines can be incentivised, such as solar water pumps that can generate solar energy and supply water to specific areas. “This can reduce the pressure on the grids,” Garg said.
Dahiya also suggested that policy initiatives could help shift the night-time demand for power in commercial and residential sectors to the morning, when solar power is available. “For instance, people mostly charge their EVs at night,” he said. “It is also cheaper to do so.” By introducing cheaper tariffs in the morning, people can be “nudged to charge their EVs in the morning hours when there is solar available”, he added.

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