Expand Industrial Investment in Renewable Energy

India’s industrial growth will require enormous amounts of additional electricity. Large manufacturers, data centers and other commercial and industrial consumers also have the capital and long-term electricity demand needed to become major investors in renewable generation.

India has already taken important steps in this direction. Commercial and industrial consumers can procure renewable electricity through open access, while companies can establish captive and group-captive renewable projects. The Green Energy Open Access Rules have lowered eligibility thresholds, simplified approvals and created a national open-access portal.

However, implementation remains complex. Rules and charges can vary across states, captive and group-captive structures can face regulatory ambiguity, and companies may encounter uncertainty involving grid access, banking, transmission charges and the movement of electricity between different corporate entities and facilities. The Ministry of Power itself identified some of these captive-generation ambiguities in 2026 and proposed further reforms.

The next step should therefore not be to create another renewable-energy program. It should be to make the framework India already has simple, predictable, and scalable enough for industry to invest at much greater scale.

Build on India’s existing captive, group-captive, and Green Energy Open Access frameworks to make it straightforward for industries to build, jointly own, finance, and use renewable-energy projects anywhere in India.

Companies should be able to build solar, wind, or hybrid renewable farms where generation is most efficient and transmit that electricity to their factories and facilities through the grid by paying transparent, predictable network charges.

The framework should:

– Simplify and standardize open-access rules across states.
– Make captive and group-captive ownership rules clear enough for modern corporate structures, subsidiaries and joint ventures.
– Provide predictable long-term transmission, wheeling, banking and other grid charges.
– Guarantee non-discriminatory access to transmission and distribution networks subject to available capacity.
– Allow companies to aggregate demand across multiple facilities where technically feasible.
– Allow industries to jointly develop large renewable projects through consortiums or special-purpose companies.
– Permit renewable projects to incorporate storage and hybrid solar-wind generation.
– Allow surplus electricity to be sold transparently into electricity markets.
– Maintain fast, digital, and time-bound approvals.
– Publish available grid capacity so investors know where they can connect new generation before committing capital.

Government incentives should increasingly focus on removing barriers rather than permanently subsidizing generation. Where financial incentives remain justified, they should be transparent, targeted and time-limited.

India does not need to create this model from scratch. Captive and group-captive renewable generation and Green Energy Open Access already allow commercial and industrial consumers to generate or procure renewable electricity. The opportunity is to simplify these mechanisms, reduce regulatory differences across states, and make them easier to use at much greater scale.

Large industrial companies are particularly well suited to drive this expansion. They consume substantial amounts of electricity, have predictable long-term demand, and can invest private capital in solar, wind, and hybrid projects. This lets them build renewable capacity where resources are strongest—and use the grid to deliver that electricity to their facilities—adding generation without requiring the government to finance every new power project.

China demonstrates what industrial demand can achieve at scale. China has increasingly linked renewable-energy development with manufacturing and industrial parks, encouraging energy-intensive industries and data centers to consume more green electricity through mechanisms including green-power trading, direct renewable connections and industrial microgrids. Manufacturing has become a major participant in its green-electricity market.

India can apply the same underlying principle through its own competitive, private-sector-led model: government provides predictable rules, grid access and common infrastructure, while companies invest their own capital in generation.

This creates a reinforcing cycle: as Indian manufacturing expands, industrial electricity demand attracts more private investment into renewable generation, which in turn increases India’s supply of affordable and cleaner electricity.

India has already created the foundation. The next step is to make industrial investment in renewable energy simple, predictable and scalable.