Curtailment concerns: the need to focus on effective power delivery, not just expansion
More than 54 GW of renewables were added in a single twelve-month period. A significant share of that output never reached a customer.
India added over 54 GW of renewable capacity between April 2025 and March 2026 — a figure that would have looked implausible a decade earlier. The less comfortable part of the same record is how much of that generation was curtailed: instructed down, or simply not despatched, on grid security and transmission-constraint grounds.
Curtailment is not a rounding error in project economics. A renewable plant earns only on the units it actually delivers. When a meaningful share of annual output is cut, the plant load factor assumed at financial close no longer holds, debt service coverage tightens, and the cost of capital for the next project rises. The penalty compounds precisely where the resource is best.
Why the constraint sits downstream of the generator
The states with the strongest solar irradiation and wind resource are frequently not the states with the heaviest industrial load. Moving power between them requires evacuation infrastructure and inter-state transmission capacity built on a timeline that matches generation. Where that build-out lags, generation queues behind it.
This is a sequencing problem more than a technology problem. Solar projects can be built in months; transmission corridors take years and cross multiple jurisdictions, rights of way and approval regimes. A planning process that commissions generation and transmission on the same schedule removes most of the curtailment that is currently treated as unavoidable.
What changes the picture
Three things reduce curtailment in practice. Transmission capacity added ahead of, rather than behind, generation. Storage co-located with variable generation, so surplus midday output is shifted into the evening rather than spilled. And despatch and forecasting systems accurate enough that system operators can accept variable generation without holding excessive reserve margins against it.
None of these are speculative technologies. All three are being deployed in India today. What determines the outcome is whether they are planned as one system or procured separately, and whether the delivery of electricity — rather than the announcement of capacity — is treated as the objective.
Originally published in Renewable Watch. Read the full piece at the source.
More on this theme in Ratul Puri on India's energy transition, or read about his role as Chairman of Hindustan Power.