In a significant development for the country’s green energy transition, out of the 90 days during the January-March 2026 quarter, 88 days saw India hitting peak power demand during the solar power generation hours.
The development assumes importance considering that more peak power demand days are occurring during solar hours, which typically extends from 11 am to 4 pm. It also means that more electricity consumption is happening during the day — when solar power generation also peaks.
“A notable operational trend is the increasing alignment of peak demand with solar generation hours: 88 out of 90 days recorded peak demand during solar hours,“ said Manoj Kumar, Analyst at the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
He explained that India’s rising power demand is increasingly being met by renewables, particularly during daytime peak hours. However, rising renewable curtailment shows that grid infrastructure and flexibility are not keeping pace with clean energy growth.
“With stronger transmission networks, more flexible grid operations, and faster battery deployment, a larger share of evening and night-time demand can also be met through non-fossil sources,’ Kumar emphasised.
Unutilised clean energy
Despite higher solar power generation and its utilisation during the daytime, there was a significant volume of clean energy that was not utilised during Q4 2025-26, with around 27 gigawatt (GW) (72 million units) of solar and 4 GW (6 million units) of wind being curtailed.
“An additional 83 GW (103 million units) of solar and 11 GW (17.5 million units) of wind were curtailed under India’s Tertiary Reserve Ancillary Service (TRAS), a manually activated power system balancing service used to resolve grid congestion. Gujarat in Western India recorded the highest curtailment, highlighting grid integration challenges in high-renewables regions,” Kumar explained.
Higher volume of electricity generation from solar power is also leading to curtailment. For instance, the price on Real Time Market (RTM) at the Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) slipped to ₹0.0003 per kwh during the afternoon of April 5, 2026. This was due to excess solar power flooding the market even as demand dipped on account of rains pushing down the mercury. The first such instance happened on May 25, 2025.
Price swings here are reflecting repeated bouts of oversupply on exchanges, even during periods of record consumption.
A similar situation happened on the IEX on Thursday. The platform said on X, “Market clearing price discovered till 4:30 pm is ₹2.07/kWh with lowest prices reaching near zero in multiple time blocks. This presents an excellent opportunity for Discoms and Open Access Consumers to optimise their power procurement cost. ”
Energy transition
Akshay Hiranandani, CEO of Serentica Renewables, emphasised that even as India has achieved the 50 per cent non-fossil capacity addition five years ahead of schedule, installed capacity alone does not guarantee energy transition.
“With 5-6 GW of green energy being curtailed and the rest frequently receiving near-zero prices in certain slots and around ₹10 in others on the exchange, the urgent priority now is to scale-up battery storage to shift supply to higher-value periods, market reform, stronger renewable purchase obligation enforcement, and a green real-time market that prices renewable power fairly,” he added.
Similarly, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Chairman of Hexa Climate Solutions, explained that plain-vanilla solar power creates a massive surge of generation during a few afternoon hours, forcing Discoms into a difficult balancing act where they over-procure during the day and scramble for expensive thermal power during the evening peak.
The market is aggressively pivoting toward firm and dispatchable renewable energy (FDRE) and round-the-clock (RTC) contracts and there is an urgent need to shift excess renewable energy to the evening peak through storage capacities, he emphasised.
As of March 2026, CREA pointed out that tenders for around 247 GWh (gigawatt hour) of storage capacity have been issued, including 138 GWh of pumped storage projects (PSP) and 111 GWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS). While only 1.2 GWh of Indiaʼs BESS is currently operational, around 6 GWh is expected to be commissioned by December 2026.
Published on April 30, 2026