Solar Power Can Meet 90% of India’s Demand if Storage Scales Up, Says Report

National solar and battery storage is now cheap enough to enable solar power to meet as much as 90% of India’s 2024 electricity demand with 930 gigawattes (GW) of solar capacity at a competitive levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) of ₹5.06/kWh ($56/MWh) than current average power purchase costs (APPC) in most states, according to a report published by Ember.

The report estimated that achieving this will required around 2,560 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of battery storage, which is equivalent to 4.9 GW of solar and 13.5 GWh of storage for every 1 GW of average demand. Even at this scale, only about 5% of annual solar generation would need to be curtailed where it exceeds demand and battery storage capacity.

The report comes at a time when the Indian government thinks the country's peak power demand will hit a record 270 GW, even though there is a global energy crisis going on. The war between the US and Israel and Iran has cut off gas supplies around the world, even from Qatar, which is India's biggest LNG supplier.

Gas-based power made up just 6.2% of India’s electricity mix in FY25 but is used to meet peak summer demand, often via Section 11 of the Electricity Act. This year, India will rely more on coal, including imports, despite rising prices, while solar-plus-storage is emerging as a long-term buffer.

Storage Challenges Slow Transition

In addition, solar is already expanding rapidly in India, and the country is struggling to scale up battery energy storage systems at the pace required to support its rapidly growing renewable energy capacity and deliver round-the-clock (24x7) power. Despite rising solar and wind additions, frequent renewable energy curtailment, especially in high-resource states like Rajasthan and Gujarat, reflects gaps in grid flexibility, transmission constraints and inadequate storage deployment.

According to DownToEarth, project execution is still slow because of high upfront costs, changing market mechanisms, uncertainty about revenue streams and limited domestic manufacturing capacity. However, policy support has improved through viability gap funding and dedicated storage tenders. Discoms, which are already having trouble with money, have been careful about signing long-term storage contracts, which has slowed down the process even more. Because of this, India's power system still relies on coal to balance out demand and meet peak demand, even though the need for clean energy that can be used when needed is becoming more urgent.