How this digital integration plan hopes to replicate UPI's success in India's power sector

Picture this: Solar panels on your rooftop generate excess power, which you store in a battery at your neighbour's home — and draw back in the evening.

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In return, a payment for renting the battery is instantly transferred from your bank account to your neighbour's, enabled by a digital public infrastructure (DPI) as seamless as UPI. Now, with the government setting up a task force led by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, a digitally integrated future for India’s power sector is beginning to take shape. The proposed India Energy Stack (IES) aims to do for the power sector what Aadhaar did for identity, and UPI for finance. By digitally integrating India’s fragmented power ecosystem — from producers and grid operators to consumers, exchanges, and regulators — the IES will enable peer-to-peer energy trading, support aggregated demand-response programmes amid rising renewable integration, and facilitate smoother compliance with carbon offsetting. The 17-member task force, constituted by the Ministry of Power on June 27, has Nilekani as its chief mentor and is charged with designing and charting a roadmap for the nationwide rollout of the IES — a process expected to take several years.

Why is a DPI-style intervention needed?