India’s rapid expansion of renewable power is running into a constraint that has little to do with the ability to build solar plants: the grid needed to move their electricity. Moody’s, through ICRA, says transmission infrastructure is not keeping pace with renewable capacity additions, creating evacuation bottlenecks in high-renewable-energy regions and increasing the risk that new projects will be unable to deliver all the power they can generate.
The problem is particularly visible among projects relying on Temporary General Network Access (T-GNA). As of May 2026, around 33% of the 54.8 GW of recently commissioned renewable capacity was operating under T-GNA. ICRA says some affected projects have experienced curtailment of 50–60% during solar hours, while around 37% of capacity operating under T-GNA at impacted substations in northern, western and southern India faces curtailment of 30–50% during solar hours.
That creates a problem beyond individual solar farms. When transmission capacity is unavailable, renewable electricity can be non-scheduled or curtailed even though the generation asset itself is operational. Developers therefore face uncertainty over how much electricity they can actually sell, while delayed grid connectivity can push back commissioning and weaken the revenue assumptions behind projects. ICRA links these concerns to a decline in new bids and delays in signing power purchase and power sale agreements, as developers and procurers become more cautious about connectivity and the risk of uncompensated curtailment.
The grid constraint is also changing the type of renewable projects being developed. As solar capacity grows, batteries can absorb electricity when generation is high and release it when the grid needs it, reducing some of the pressure created by the mismatch between generation and demand. This is helping drive greater interest in round-the-clock, firm renewable and solar-plus-storage projects, although storage brings its own costs, execution challenges and financing requirements.
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India is therefore moving into a phase where adding renewable megawatts is no longer enough to measure the progress of the sector. Transmission capacity, grid access and storage increasingly determine how much of that generation can actually reach consumers. ICRA is calling for time-bound strengthening of both inter-state and intra-state networks as renewable generation continues to expand, with the sector’s renewable share of electricity generation expected to exceed 35% by 2029–30. The bottleneck is shifting from how quickly India can build solar to how quickly its power system can absorb it.
