Q. India has made great strides in solar power capacity. What is the next logical step?
India has settled the question of scale. Installed solar capacity has grown from 2.82GW in 2014 to more than 168GW at the end of August 2026. The opportunity now is to define the next phase of the transition, and I see three priorities.
The first is innovation through digitalisation, AI and new technology. A grid that once tracked a few hundred power stations must now track millions of rooftops, pumps and batteries.
The second is storage and resilient supply chains. Solar becomes round-the-clock power only when it is stored. The CEA puts India’s requirement at 411 GWh by 2031-32, and SECI has already contracted 2GW solar with 4GWh storage at Rs2.86 a unit. The government has now put storage inside the grid plan itself. The Green Energy Corridor Phase-III supports 50GWh of battery energy storage with Rs50,000 crore, placed at the generator end or wherever the grid needs it most, alongside intra-state transmission to evacuate up to 135GW of renewable energy by 2032-33.
The third is to focus on livelihoods through solar irrigation and cold storage, strengthening farmers’ livelihoods and providing reliable daytime power. India has already solarised more than 27 lakh pumps under PM-KUSUM. The next phase is expanding the existing installations and including Agri-PV to enhance farmers’ incomes, while improving transparency in Discom performance through the segregation of urban and rural loads.
Q. Even with subsidies, solar installation still remains a hefty initial investment for Indian homeowners. Do you see the cost going down?
It is coming down, but the bigger shift is that the household no longer carries the cost alone. Under PM Surya Ghar, central assistance of up to Rs78,000 for a 3kW system, concessional loans at 5.75 per cent have been sanctioned for 22 lakh applicants.
Three things in ecosystem creation will bring the cost down further. Scale, because the scheme now adds a lakh homes every six days and every installer, lender and Discom gets cheaper with volume. The business model, because under utility-led aggregation the Discom installs the system and the household pays nothing upfront. And the delivery network behind it, with 34,000 registered vendors and more than 2 lakh people trained to install and service these systems. For a family, rooftop solar has stopped being a cost and become an asset that earns.
Q. How are India’s efforts at localisation progressing?
India has moved from assembling panels to building the value chain behind them. Module manufacturing capacity has grown from 2.3GW in 2014 to 228GW enlisted under the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers in September 2026. Cell manufacturing, which stood at zero before 2014, is now at about 35GW.
Q. Solar still faces problems of a non-sustainable value chain as well as affordability, scarcity of raw materials and also the intermittency due to nighttime or cloud cover. Do you think technology can offer solutions soon?
The value chain is fragile because it is concentrated, not because the technology is unsustainable. Diversification is now real, with India alone holding over 228GW of enlisted module capacity and about 35GW of cells, enough to be a second reliable supplier for the Global South.
On raw materials, battery chemistry is moving away from scarce inputs. Lithium iron phosphate packs, which use no cobalt or nickel, averaged $81 per kWh in 2025 against $128 for nickel-based packs. Sodium-based battery storage technologies are also approaching commercial readiness and merit greater focus as a scalable alternative.
In panels, the next source of material is the panels themselves. India could generate over 11 million tonnes of solar waste by 2047 and recovering it could meet 38 per cent of the sector’s manufacturing inputs.
Intermittency is where technology has delivered most clearly. Battery packs for stationary storage fell 45 per cent in a single year to $70 per kWh in 2025, and shifting half of daytime solar into the evening now adds only about $33 per MWh, taking dispatchable solar to around $76 per MWh. That makes solar a real option for meeting peak load.
