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.
“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.
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.
The difficulty lies in matching the speed of generation projects with the grid build-out, says Sinha.
“Generation projects can be constructed in 18-24 months… 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.
Vibhuti Garg of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis also blames “poor planning” for the problem.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
“Had that been the case, India could have stored the energy and used it during evening hours rather than wasting it,” says Garg.
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.
“Many storage projects that were meant to come up fell through as a result,” Garg adds.
