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Australian energy ministers agreed this month to fast-track rule changes allowing plug-in solar panels and batteries. These small, unlicensed kits can be installed by tenants and apartment dwellers without an electrician or a landlord’s approval. As we saw being done in the UK earlier.
The trigger was the Solar Sharer scheme, which already offers several hours of free daytime power in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia (Victoria joins in October) to soak up the country’s rooftop solar glut. The problem it exposed: the people with the least ability to benefit — tenants, apartment dwellers, anyone without a roof of their own were also the people least equipped to use it, unless they could plug in a small battery and bank the free hours for the evening peak.
It’s a tidy piece of policy design: use power that would otherwise be wasted, aim it at people currently locked out of the solar boom, and let the technology (a $1,000 plug-in kit) do the redistributing. India has both halves of that same problem, at a larger scale and one would argue, a more urgent one.
INDIA ALREADY HAS THE FREE POWER. IT’S CALLED CURTAILMENT.
India curtailed 8,133 GWh of solar generation between April and June 2026 alone, the government told Parliament. This was solar capacity that existed and generated power from the sun, that grid operators chose not to use. Industry estimates put the rolling 15-month total at close to 11 TWh, enough to supply roughly 10 million homes for a year. ICRA’s analysis is blunter still: about a third of the 54.8GW of renewable capacity commissioned recently is being evacuated through temporary network access, and curtailment under that route runs 50-60% during solar hours in Rajasthan and Gujarat, the two states that between them host nearly half of India’s installed solar capacity.
Some of this is the transmission-lag story SaurEnergy has covered before, lines simply not keeping pace with generation. But Ember’s H1 2026 analysis adds an uncomfortable second cause: on India’s sunniest days, coal plants are already running at their technical minimum (55% PLF typically), and grid operators curtail solar rather than push coal lower still. Fossil generation falls to around 125GW at 1pm against a 174GW evening peak — a 50GW midday trough that renewable output alone can’t fill without more flexibility in the system. Either way, the conclusion is the same as Australia’s: there are hours, every sunny day, when India is generating more solar power than it is willing or able to use.
India throws away more solar in one quarter than Australia’s entire free-power debate is arguing over. The question isn’t whether the surplus exists — it’s who gets to stand under it.
THE VILLAGES UNDER THE PANELS DON’T GET THE POWER
That surplus exists at the same time as a well-documented, entirely separate failure: communities that host India’s largest solar parks often have worse power access than the grid they’re feeding. In Bhadla, Rajasthan, home to the world’s largest single solar park at 2,245MW our reporters have repeatedly found villages losing grazing land and livelihoods for a facility whose power leaves on transmission lines that bypass them entirely; one village school shut for lack of pupils as families left. In Pavagada, Karnataka, nearly 2,000 families leased roughly 13,000 acres for the 2,050MW Shakti Sthala park; only around 2,000 of an estimated 12,000 displaced workers found jobs at the plant, and residents still describe routine power cuts within sight of the panels.
This isn’t a uniquely Indian problem. It’s the standard failure mode of siting big infrastructure in low-income, low-political-voice areas, and it happens with wind farms from Scotland to Kenya. What’s unusual is that India has one of the few genuinely free inputs in the entire energy transition in the form of curtailed daylight solar sitting unused a few kilometres from communities with some of the weakest power access in the country it’s meant to be decarbonising. Rooftop solar subsidy, as we see with the PM Suryaghar scheme seeks to cover some of that gap, or even Maharashtra’s 100% subsidy for 1kW solar. But it is nstill limited by those who have a roof to spare.
TWO PROBLEMS, TWO ALLOCATIONS — NOT ONE BLANKET SCHEME
The instinct, understandably, is to reach for a single fix: give everyone free solar hours, the way Australia’s Solar Sharer does. But a blanket scheme spread across a state’s entire consumer base is exactly the design Australia is now retrofitting with plug-in batteries, because it turned out to help the people already best positioned to use it. Homeowners who could shift laundry and EV charging to midday, while doing almost nothing for tenants or renters as they are called there, unless a battery bridged the gap. Spread the same volume of free power across tens of millions of urban consumers and the per-household benefit rounds to noise. Spread it instead across a few thousand households who already tolerate the infrastructure, and the same volume is transformative.
That argues for treating the two Indian problems separately, with two different funding sources. Daytime hours already being curtailed cost developers nothing to give away. That power currently earns zero rupees, so routing it toward flexible daytime demand (agricultural pump tariffs, EV charging incentives, cold-storage loads) is a pure system-efficiency play with no revenue hit, similar in spirit to Australia’s Solar Sharer. Host-community power, by contrast, should not depend on curtailment being available on a given day. It needs to be reliable, which means carving it out of power the plant is actually selling, all hours, funded by a small and predictable share of revenue rather than leftover surplus.
WHAT WOULD 1-2% ACTUALLY COST?
Less than the debate around it suggests. Take Bhadla: at 2,245MW and a desert capacity factor of roughly 18-19%, the park generates in the region of a minimum of 3,500 GWh a year. One percent of that is about 35 GWh, enough, at a typical rural household’s annual consumption of roughly 1,200 units, to fully power more than 30,000 homes for free. Pavagada, at 2,050MW and a somewhat better 24% capacity factor, generates around 4,300 GWh annually; 1% is enough for a similar-sized giveaway. In both cases, the surrounding host population is a small fraction of that number.
On the revenue side, a volumetric carve-out of 1-2% of generation reduces a project’s sales by 1-2%, not more, since it isn’t layered on top of existing costs, it simply redirects units that would otherwise have been sold at the PPA tariff. That is a materially smaller ask than international practice already treats as standard. Ireland mandates that wind farms above 5MW pay €2 per MWh generated into a community benefit fund. At typical European wholesale or PPA prices, close to 2.5-3% of revenue, besides a further fixed annual payment to households within a kilometre of the turbines. Scotland’s voluntary benchmark for onshore wind, £5,000 per installed MW per year, works out to a broadly similar share of revenue for a typical wind project; its proposed new benchmark for solar is lower, £700-1,000 per MW, reflecting solar’s lower capacity factor and revenue per megawatt.
THE GAP INDIA HASN’T CLOSED
India has no equivalent mandatory mechanism. What host communities typically get is a one-time or annual land-lease payment, negotiated project by project, plus whatever a developer chooses to route through its Companies Act CSR obligation. A discretionary, inconsistent, and disconnected effort from how much power the plant actually generates. There is no MNRE or CERC rule tying a fixed share of output, or revenue, to the villages inside a project’s fence line, in the way Ireland’s €2/MWh levy or Scotland’s per-MW benchmark do.
The honest complication is distribution, not developer reluctance: most solar park capacity is evacuated through dedicated transmission corridors that bypass the local low-voltage network entirely, so ‘free power for the host village’ isn’t just a tariff decision — it requires a wheeling or local-supply arrangement between the developer, the state DISCOM and the transmission utility, none of whom currently have a regulatory reason to build one. That’s a genuine design problem, not just a moral one, and it’s the reason a mandated 1-2% host-community allocation would need CERC or state-commission backing to work, not merely developer goodwill.
Still, the two halves of the fix are already proven abroad and separately proven in India: curtailed daylight power is real and free to redirect; a low single-digit share of saleable generation is a financeable, internationally standard cost of doing business next to people who didn’t ask to live beside a 2GW power plant. What’s missing isn’t the economics. Especially with the cost of energy storage also falling to levels where smaller distribuited grids are no longer forbidding. It’s a formal rule that says the 1-2% has to go to Bhadla and Pavagada before it goes anywhere else.
We are India’s leading B2B media house, reporting full-time on solar energy, wind, battery storage, solar inverters, and electric vehicle (EV)
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