Opinion | India’s Solar Growth Enters a New Era

Sudhanshu Dubey of Gwalior has for long felt financially drained when it comes to paying his electricity bills. Every month the amount would cross INR 10,000, which is very high for a below middle-class family. Dubey’s power consumption was on the rise until he couldn’t bear it anymore and decided to put up solar panels under a government scheme on the rooftop of his house.

Dubey, who resides in Jawar Nagar, hasn’t paid any bills for more than a year now. His story may appear marginal. However, multiply it by 43 lakh similar households, there is a noticeable difference the solar panels are making across the country.

That is the single thread worth pulling on, because everything else whether it is the gigawatts, the tariffs, the export, it all flows from this one shift.

Our Capacity?

Solar-related processes in India stopped being a niche technology and became infrastructure, as ordinary and expected as a road or a power line.

Today, the level of scale up in this field is hard to overstate.

Previously, India had about 3 GW of installed solar capacity, a rounding error in the national grid in 2014. These numbers had now crossed 162 GW in 2026, the fiftyfold jump in the past decade is considered very significant considering the fluctuating political and economic situation globally.

This financial year, India has added as much as 44.61 GW of solar capacity, nearly double than previous year.

According to official figures, India is now the world’s second-largest solar growth market. Numbers like these usually invite skepticism — targets announced with fanfare, then quietly missed.

The rise didn’t happen out of nowhere, the “why” about how the change happened is an interesting story. For that context, we need to understand the changing cost of solar in recent years.

Our Trajectory

In 2010, solar power in India was costing about INR 18 per unit.

Through competitive e-Reverse Auctions run by agencies like the Solar Energy Corporation of India, developers bid tariffs down year after year, hitting a record INR 2.44 per unit at the Bhadla Solar Park auction in 2017.

Bhadla itself tells the story in miniature: a stretch of barren Rajasthan desert, unsuitable for much else, is now a 2,245 MW solar hub. India today has one of the cheapest solar electricity markets in the world. The levelised cost sits at USD 35 per MWh against a global average of USD 44.

The second reason that needs to be emphasised is that policy schemes didn’t stop at power plants, it went to rooftops and farms.

Take the example of PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, the wide popular scheme that benefitted the family of Dubey, is now the world’s largest residential rooftop solar programme, with over INR 14,771 crore disbursed and 7.7 lakh households already paying nothing for electricity.

Likewise, another scheme in the form of PM-KUSUM did something similar for farmers, solarising irrigation pumps and letting them sell surplus power back to the grid. Nearly 11.49 lakh solar pumps were installed which meant that over 21 lakh farmers benefited. Distributed solar — rooftops and farms together — now makes up more than a third of all new solar capacity added each year.

These numbers matter on the ground because it converted millions of Indian citizens from passive electricity consumers into small-scale power producers, which is a much harder thing to reverse than a policy on mere paper.

The newest chapter in the country’s solar story is the Pradhan Mantri Surya Sarovar Yojana, approved earlier in July, with an agenda to put 5,000 MW of floating solar — panels on reservoirs and industrial ponds — paired with battery storage, onto water bodies instead of scarce land.

The Way Ahead

With India’s floating solar potential estimated at over 102 GW, and land increasingly the binding constraint on renewable growth, this is less a new idea than a necessary one.

None of this means that the job has ended, in the words of PM Modi this is a “revolutional step” in solar power. “The scope of solar energy initiatives is not limited to energy production—it is creating new skills, developing a new service ecosystem, and expanding investment opportunities at the grassroots,” he stressed at the India Energy Week last year.

India’s 500 GW non-fossil fuel target for 2030 is ambitious, transmission and storage still need to scale fast, and manufacturing self-reliance is a work in progress despite incentives like the PLI scheme.

But the direction of travel — falling costs, rising manufacturing capacity, and millions of individual rooftops joining the grid — is not something that can be manufactured by a press release.

It has to be built, house by house, pond by pond, auction by auction.

Just like Dubey’s near-zero electricity bill should not be seen as an isolated story. It is what national policy looks like when it actually reaches every kitchen and every household showcasing the real measure of India’s solar story.