India shifts renewable energy focus toward reliability and industrial cost savings

India’s renewable energy sector is shifting focus from merely increasing generation capacity to ensuring grid reliability and cost-effectiveness. Ratul Puri, Chairman of Hindustan Power, notes that as renewable penetration grows, the priority is moving toward building a system that provides dependable, dispatchable, and affordable clean energy to meet rising demand.

To achieve this, procurement strategies are increasingly valuing storage-backed and hybrid projects. While these may have higher upfront costs, they help manage intermittency, transmission constraints, and balancing requirements, ultimately reducing the systemic cost of delivering power.

In the industrial sector, renewable energy adoption offers significant cost-saving potential for small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). A report presented at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Green Steel and Mining Summit suggests that demand aggregation of renewable electricity could reduce power costs for India’s secondary steel MSME clusters by as much as 34 percent.

With electricity representing up to 40 percent of operating costs for these units, transitioning to renewables—which currently cost between ₹4.5 and ₹6 per unit compared to grid tariffs of ₹7 to ₹8—is identified as a primary route to lowering both emissions and expenses.