Today, anybody can transfer money to anyone else on a mobile phone, thanks to the digital payment network called Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Can electricity work the same way?

Imagine a farmer in Uttar Pradesh with surplus rooftop solar power and a machining shop owner in Rajasthan looking to slash his energy bill; why can’t they transact with each other?

Today — aside from the farmer selling energy to the local utility at whatever price trickles down to him, and the machine shop owner resigning himself to whatever tariff his utility charges — there is only one way they can do mutual business, bypassing the utility.

The farmer can offer to sell energy on an energy exchange (one of the three in the country); the small-scale unit owner can put in a buy bid. The exchange is the counterparty, responsible for the supply of electricity and the payment for it — so neither party needs to know the other. This is theoretically possible, but practically infeasible.

It is too much of an effort to register on an exchange just to transact occasionally.

Now scale up the example to millions of producers and consumers, and tens of millions of devices — appliances, vehicle batteries, solar-powered water pumps at farms, energised battery packs, SCADA industrial monitoring systems, and smart meters. All of them participate in energy supply and demand, or generate billions of bits of data that can be harnessed for analytics, demand management and policymaking.

This is an unfolding dream scenario — and making it possible is the India Energy Stack (IES), an initiative of the Ministry of Power, spurred by suggestions from not-for-profit regulatory think tank FSR Global, which is also the knowledge partner.

In June 2025, the Ministry set up a task force to pilot IES and eventually roll it out nationally. Things appear to have moved quite fast since then. The biggest use case of IES — peer-to-peer (P2P) trading, where anybody can sell electricity to any buyer, with the transaction verified and payment made automatically — was demonstrated at the recent Delhi AI Summit.

Swetha Ravi Kumar, Executive Director of FSR Global, tells businessline that the organisation is currently working on proving a couple of other use cases too.

One is energy data exchange for formulating public policy and regulation — making thousands of dense, multilingual regulatory documents machine-readable. With such standardised exchange of information, it would be possible to know and compare electricity regulations and tariffs across States. It would also help simplify regulatory compliance.

Another use involves making distributed energy resources (DER) visible. DER visibility is more than just knowing, for example, that a solar array exists on a feeder — it is real-time information on how and why a distributed energy resource is behaving, which helps in grid management.

Technology providers

Even as these use cases are being proved, FSR Global is spearheading the preparation of two key documents for the rollout of IES — a strategy document and an architecture document. Kumar says these are likely to be released in June, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of IES. So far, three intermediate versions (0.1, 0.2 and 0.3) have been issued.

In the meantime, dozens of technology providers — somewhat like mobile app builders — have emerged. They offer services such as energy transaction platforms, EV charging point locators and payment systems, and data analytics and forecasting tools. “Nearly a hundred use cases have been identified,” says Vishal Pandya, Managing Director of Clickpower.in, a P2P platform, which is like an ONDC for selling or buying power.

IES is truly an idea whose time has come because the face of the electricity sector in India is changing.

The sector is run on a legacy IT system that was built to manage a few large generating stations and bulk consumers; today, however, you have thousands — millions in future — of small generators. This demands a different deal — IES.

Discoms won’t resist

IES cannot become a reality until electricity distribution companies (discoms) get on board. Their financial health is fragile, and with P2P trading they could potentially lose some business.

Yet, they are not resisting IES. Nearly all of them appear keen to see it happen. Why? Because while P2P trading may take away some business, other applications of IES could be useful for long-term planning and optimisation of capital expenditure. “They have a lot to gain,” says Kumar.

Their participation is expected to be formally announced at the upcoming Bharat Electricity Summit in New Delhi on March 19-22.

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Published on March 16, 2026