Adani Power, which is setting up a 2,400 MW greenfield thermal power plant in Bihar, will sell power to the State’s utility at ₹6.075 a kWhr, according to a recent press release. The company received the ‘letter of award’ for the $3 billion coal-fired power plant on Friday. The tariff shows that electricity from new coal plants has become costlier than renewable energy with storage, which rules at around ₹5 a kWhr.

Standalone solar (or wind) is, of course, far cheaper. To illustrate, on August 18, Punjab-based renewable energy company SAEL Industries signed up with the State’s utility to sell solar power from its 800 MW plant for ₹2.97 a kWhr.

20 on the roof

Rooftop solar was slow to start. After being a laggard for years, it has been improving its run rate, thanks perhaps to the rising electricity tariffs across the country. July ended with total rooftop installed capacity of 19.88 GW. So, as this is being written, the number would have surely crossed the 20 GW mark.

Application vs installation

The PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, a subsidy scheme for small-sized rooftop solar plants, has been seeing slow progress in installation, compared with the demand.

It was recently said in Parliament that under the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, there have so far been 16.5 lakh rooftop solar installations, against 58 lakh applications. (Gujarat with 5.48 lakh installations and Maharashtra with 3.92 lakh top the list.)

The scheme was launched in February 2024. In 2024-25, 7.31 lakh installations were done against 33.24 lakh applications — an achievement rate of 22 per cent. This improved to 37 per cent in the April–July period of the current year, when 25 lakh applications were received and 9.19 lakh rooftop plants installed under the scheme.

NLC’s renewable RoE

NLC India Ltd, one of the more active PSUs in renewable energy, has so far invested ₹1,857.59 crore in RE projects in Tamil Nadu, and earned a profit of ₹234.78 crore in 2024-25 — a ‘return on equity’ of 12.6 per cent. The total investment in these projects was ₹6,350 crore. The ‘return on investment’ works out to be 3.7 per cent. These numbers were disclosed to Parliament recently by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.

The company is currently constructing 2,110 MW of RE projects; it has 7,500 MW more on the drawing board, including a 500 MWhr battery energy storage system plant in Tamil Nadu.

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Published on September 1, 2025