RE Roadblocks

Bottlenecks like transmission gaps, discom delays and rising project costs are stalling India's green push

- • Himanshu Ojha

To understand India's renewable energy (RE) push in 2025 is to witness a high-stakes Olympics race, where the runner is sprinting towards a 500GW finish line, but the track is littered with several hurdles.

The momentum has now come to a near grinding halt for the country's green sector. The bottlenecks are aplenty—transmission gaps, land acquisition issues and poor health of state power discoms.

These structural and financial roadblocks have led to the pipeline collapsing to just 5.8GW of RE projects being awarded in the first eight months of 2025-26, according to a report by Icra, a credit-rating agency. This is a sharp fall from the record 47.3GW of clean energy capacity in 2023-24 and 40.6GW in 2024-25.

Not just awards, nearly 50GW of projects remain stuck without power purchase agreements (PPAs), raising concerns about whether India can maintain its ambitious 2030 target.

"The decline in new project bids and delays in signing PPAs for large RE capacity by central nodal agencies clearly reflect the concerns on the execution related to available transmission connectivity for the RE sector," said Girishkumar Kadam, senior vice-president and group head, corporate ratings, Icra.

Tendered projects cumulatively worth billions of dollars awarded to companies like JSW, NTPC, Adani Green, ACME Solar, Renew and Sembcorp are stranded.

First and foremost, the tendering regime needs a reset as a structural fatigue has set in the way projects are being designed and awarded.

Structural Strain

The Solar Energy Commission of India (SECI) invites bids through a reverse auction, where developers compete by quoting the lowest tariff. And “in their rush to win projects, developers often bid aggressively, assuming the project will remain financially viable”, says Akkenaguntla Karthik, an energy-market analyst.