In this photograph taken on October 5, 2021, farmer and doctor Amit Singh speaks during an interview with AFP at his solar farm in Bhaloji village of India's Rajasthan state. FEATURE by Glenda KWEK (Photo by SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP) / TO GO WITH Climate-UN-COP26-energy-solar,FEATURE by Glenda KWEK (Photo by SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images)

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In Rajasthan, India's largest state, the energy transition is no longer just about how many solar panels rise from the desert. It is a fundamental stress test of whether a legacy grid can evolve to handle the volatile surges of a low-carbon future.

For Rajasthan's energy secretary, Arti Dogra, that distinction matters. The challenge isn't producing more clean electricity—the state has already cracked that part. Across India, non-fossil sources now account for 50% of total installed capacity, a milestone reached in June 2025—five years ahead of the country's Paris Agreement commitments. It's making sure power actually reaches farmers, that the grid doesn't buckle as solar scales, and that utility crews can fix problems before they cascade into outages.

Historically, Rajasthan served as a microcosm of the developing world’s energy struggle. The state is vast, arid, and dependent on power hauled over long distances. It has no local coal reserves or hydropower. For decades, utilities just reacted to maintenance problems, burdened by high supply costs and weak balance sheets. India's progress occurs despite the fact that it stares down a $160 billion annual investment gap to fully modernize its infrastructure.

Solar, though, has improved the odds. Abundant sunshine became a competitive advantage, and Rajasthan emerged as a renewable powerhouse almost by necessity.

But amping up power generation was only the first phase. The next is making the grid intelligent enough to absorb that power at scale—flexible, predictive, and reliable. Rajasthan can become a model: “This turnaround not only helped us with our own economy, but it also helped catalyze socioeconomic change," Dogra emphasized during our discussion.

While Rajasthan serves as a laboratory, India’s national numbers confirm a massive shift: in 2025, the country surpassed the United States in annual solar installations for the first time, adding 38 gigawatts of capacity compared to 33 GW for the U.S.

A 2019 national policy opened the door to smaller distributed solar plants located close to where power was actually needed, especially for daytime farm use. Instead of electricity shipped from far-off generators, Rajasthan started injecting power directly into local grids. Losses dropped. Daytime supply improved. Costs fell. This move toward localized, green power helped renewables meet over 51% of India's total electricity demand in July 2025.

Digital Twins Do The Heavy Lifting

The economic metrics are staggering. Dogra says the state has now commissioned roughly 4,000 megawatts of distributed renewable capacity—enough to match its thermal generation—at rates as low as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, cheaper than almost anywhere in the United States.

In some areas, excess solar flows back into the local grid, reducing the need to buy expensive power elsewhere. What had been a one-way system is becoming something more dynamic. It is a vital component of a national trend in which, for the first time in 50 years, coal-fired electricity generation declined year on year in 2025.

That’s where power generation needs grid intelligence: knowing where electricity flows, catching equipment problems early, and managing peaks before they hit.

Working with The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet—a public-private-philanthropic partnership that works with governments to accelerate clean energy access in emerging markets— Rajasthan began building India's first digital twin at scale for part of its distribution network in early 2025. This moves the utility away from information silos and toward a unified, predictive intelligence.

The digital twin created for one of Rajasthan’s largest state utilities mapped 5 million grid assets—poles, lines, transformers, and network infrastructure—by pulling together feeder, meter, and billing data previously stored in separate silos. By using grid analytics and load-flow modeling, the utility can now identify loss-prone areas, assess renewable hosting capacity, and address the limited visibility of solar power flows in a high-renewable network.

The results are tangible: 18 million people now have more reliable power, and the initiative’s carbon abatement costs are 50% lower than those of other climate tech solutions. "We've been able to identify our high-risk transformers and take care of them in a preventive manner," Dogra says. This shift from reactive to predictive maintenance is the cornerstone of modern grid reliability.

"The sooner everyone gets on this kind of a system where everything is mapped, where you can be more predictive and know what is coming your way," she adds, "the better informed our decisions can be."

That operational shift is why Rajasthan matters far beyond India's borders. As the world's third-largest renewable energy producer, India is in the spotlight.

Nirmal Shaju of the Global Energy Alliance argues that utilities across the developing world face the same underlying problem: renewables are cheap and modular, but grids are still managed as if power flows only one way—from big centralized plants to passive consumers. That one-way model is less relevant when solar is everywhere and battery storage is available.

Battery Storage Is A Game-Changer

Shaju describes a progression that starts with digitalization, turns data into intelligence, adds flexibility through storage, and builds local, on-site capacity to sustain it. The alliance's Grids of the Future initiative helps utilities make that transition, noting that India is a blueprint for others to follow.

Indeed, the Global Energy Alliance is now scaling this work across more markets, applying large-scale batteries and grid intelligence models from Malawi to Barbados to Vietnam. Malawi, in particular, serves as a primary example of where the alliance is currently scaling its work to improve clean energy access.

Delhi offers a complementary proof point. In 2023, the city commissioned what the alliance calls India's first commercial utility-scale battery—20 megawatts running for two hours. The point wasn't the size. It was showing that standalone battery systems could be financed and approved without raising consumer tariffs.

"It's shifting low-cost power and displacing high-cost power," Shaju told me. "Shifting green power when there's a surplus and displacing carbon-intensive power.”

Taken together, Rajasthan and Delhi sketch the shape of India's next energy challenge: not building more renewable capacity, but redesigning the grid to make that capacity dependable and affordable.

Skeptics aren't wrong to note that digital twins and battery storage still lean heavily on concessional funding and strong institutions. What works for a capable state utility may not translate easily to weaker ones with less data and less money.

But Rajasthan's case is persuasive precisely because it wasn't frictionless. Engineers mapped assets across thousands of square kilometers, sometimes on foot, sometimes by drone. The financing and regulatory frameworks had to be built from scratch. The lesson isn't that transformation is easy. It's that transformation is practical when policy, technology, and operations actually line up.

India has already shown it can build renewable capacity at scale. The question now is whether it can build a smarter grid to make that power dependable and affordable—and whether that grid can become a model for the Global South that is trying to do the same.

“You probably need some sort of concessional financing in order to kick-start the market,” Shaju says. “And if you demonstrate the first proof point, then the private sector can come in and expand. You will bring in private capital.”

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