Foremost among them is a shortage of grid capacity. The renewables’ build out has significantly outpaced transmission infrastructure, a point of major concern for policymakers.<\/p>\n
“In the first quarter of 2026, transmission constraints accounted for nearly two-thirds of all renewable energy curtailment at 300 gigawatt-hours (GWh),” according to Ember, a global energy think-tank.<\/p>\n
Put simply, that means a bulk of the clean energy that was produced in India was wasted because the country’s transmission lines have been dogged by missed targets, with one out of four inter-state projects facing delays of over a year.<\/p>\n
The difficulty lies in matching the speed of generation projects with the grid build-out, says Sinha.<\/p>\n
“Generation projects can be constructed in 18-24 months\u2026 Transmission can take much longer because they involve right-of-way, land acquisition, approvals and coordination across many agencies. It is an execution issue that becomes more important as the system gets larger,” he adds.<\/p>\n
Vibhuti Garg of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis also blames “poor planning” for the problem.<\/p>\n
The grid was able to absorb new capacity as long as India was generating 10-15GW annually, she told the BBC. But that pace has dramatically increased, reaching a record 51GW last year, and the infrastructure is no longer able to cope.<\/p>\n
The concentration of renewables projects in the north-western states of Gujarat and Rajasthan has also compounded the challenge of evacuating power in the face of such grid shortages.<\/p>\n
Analysts at Ember now believe this growing mismatch between fast-moving generation projects and slower-moving transmission infrastructure, is the “most critical operational risk to the country’s 2030 target of 500 gigawatts (GW) of non-fossil electricity”.<\/p>\n
A quick solution to addressing this gap would have been to build battery storage systems at renewable pooling stations to integrate the power into the grid.<\/p>\n
“Had that been the case, India could have stored the energy and used it during evening hours rather than wasting it,” says Garg.<\/p>\n
But storage capacity has not grown because of a huge jump in the price of batteries, raw material shortages due to the war in the Middle East and a fall in the value of the Indian currency which has jacked up financing costs for Indian companies.<\/p>\n
“Many storage projects that were meant to come up fell through as a result,” Garg adds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Foremost among them is a shortage of grid capacity. The renewables’ build out has significantly outpaced transmission infrastructure,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-779520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}