India's Renewable Decade: How Open Access Took Shape

A professor teaching an energy policy seminar in 2016 would have described India’s renewable sector in cautious terms: a promising but still-nascent experiment, dependent on subsidies, reliant on imported equipment, and contributing a modest share to a grid still dominated by coal. Ten years on, that lecture needs a full rewrite.

By the close of FY 2025–26, India’s installed renewable energy capacity had grown to nearly 275 GW, up from roughly 76 GW in 2014 — more than three and a half times over in about a decade. Solar alone now accounts for upward of 150 GW of that total, a sector that barely existed at utility scale when the National Solar Mission launched in 2010 with an initial target of just 20 GW. India now ranks third in the world for installed renewable capacity, behind only China and the United States, having recently overtaken Brazil. In June 2025, the country crossed a symbolic threshold: half of its total installed electricity capacity now comes from non-fossil sources, a milestone reached five years ahead of the date India committed to under the Paris Agreement.

For anyone teaching or studying energy policy, environmental economics, or sustainability, this isn’t just an impressive set of statistics. It’s a case study in how a national infrastructure system gets rebuilt within a single career span — and it raises questions worth bringing into a classroom.

The Decade in Numbers

The pace of change has been uneven, and that unevenness is itself instructive. Growth was gradual through the mid-2010s as costs fell and supply chains matured, then accelerated sharply in the back half of the decade. FY 2025–26 alone saw a record addition of over 55 GW of new non-fossil capacity — nearly double the previous year’s increase, and the largest single-year jump on record. Wind capacity additions hit an all-time high in the same period.

Manufacturing tells a parallel story. India’s domestic solar module manufacturing capacity has expanded from roughly 2 GW in 2014 to well over 150 GW today, supported by production-linked incentives and a deliberate push to localize the supply chain rather than depend on imports. A recent reduction in GST on renewable equipment, from 12% down to 5%, has reinforced that shift.

None of this happened evenly across the country, though. A small handful of states — Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu — account for the large majority of solar and wind capacity installed in recent years. That concentration is a useful entry point for classroom discussion about why some states attract renewable investment faster than others: land availability, grid infrastructure, solar irradiation, and, just as critically, how quickly a state’s electricity regulator updates its rules.

From Subsidy to Market: Why “Open Access” Exists

The capacity numbers only tell half the story. The more interesting shift, for anyone studying energy markets specifically, is how India built the mechanisms to let that capacity actually reach consumers.

For most of India’s electricity history, a business or institution had exactly one supplier: the state distribution company, or DISCOM, at a fixed regulated tariff. Open Access changes that arrangement. It allows large electricity consumers — typically those above a state-defined load threshold, often 1 MW, though some states set it lower for renewable-specific schemes — to buy power directly from a private generator while still using the existing grid to physically deliver it.

Several procurement structures have emerged under this framework. In a Captive arrangement, a consumer holds a substantial equity stake in the generating project itself. Group Captive allows several consumers to co-own a project and share its output. Third-Party Sale requires no ownership stake at all, just a power purchase agreement with an independent generator. Each model carries a different mix of upfront investment, ownership risk, and regulatory treatment — most notably around the Cross-Subsidy Surcharge, a charge that Open Access consumers may owe to compensate DISCOMs for lost retail revenue, and from which Captive and Group Captive structures are typically exempted.

What makes this genuinely interesting as a research subject is that electricity regulation in India is set state by state. Each State Electricity Regulatory Commission writes its own rules for connectivity, banking of surplus energy, net metering thresholds, and surcharge structures. A student comparing one state’s monthly energy-banking framework against another state’s annual settlement model would find two distinct policy philosophies operating under the same national renewable energy target. That fragmentation is exactly the kind of comparative regulatory variation that makes for strong case study material.

Why This Matters Beyond the Energy Sector

The renewable transition has created demand for a kind of professional who barely existed as a distinct category a decade ago: someone fluent in both the technical and regulatory sides of power markets. In FY 2025–26 alone, more than 1.2 lakh people were trained across various parts of India’s renewable energy value chain — a figure that reflects how quickly the talent pipeline has had to expand alongside the infrastructure itself.

The roles emerging from this shift span far more than engineering. Regulatory analysts track and interpret state-level tariff orders. Legal teams structure power purchase agreements and navigate compliance across multiple state jurisdictions at once. Finance professionals model long-term tariff stability against capital costs. Sustainability officers translate corporate ESG commitments into actual procurement decisions. For students in engineering, law, finance, or public policy programs, the sector offers a genuinely interdisciplinary entry point — and one where the rules are still being written, which is rarer than it sounds in most established industries.

What the Next Decade Likely Looks Like

India’s stated target is 500 GW of installed non-fossil electricity capacity by 2030, a commitment made at COP26. Reaching it from a 2026 base of roughly 283 GW of combined renewable and nuclear capacity is achievable on current trajectories, but it depends on solving problems that are different in kind from the ones the sector faced a decade ago. Back then, the central challenge was bringing the cost of generation down far enough to compete with coal. Today, the challenge is integration: building enough storage and grid capacity to absorb intermittent solar and wind at scale, and extending the benefits of Open Access beyond the handful of states that currently dominate it.

Those are open problems, not solved ones — which is precisely why the sector remains worth studying rather than simply reported on. The next decade of India’s energy transition is likely to be defined less by how much capacity gets built, and more by how intelligently that capacity gets connected, financed, and regulated.

At Open Access Exchange, we work with the regulatory detail behind these numbers every day, tracking individual state tariff orders, connectivity rules, and renewable procurement structures as they evolve. If you’re researching or teaching this space and want a closer look at how a specific state’s framework operates, our policies section tracks the regulatory landscape state by state.