S02E1: The Next Solar Superpower? India’s 10M Rooftop Plan
In the first episode of Season 2 of The OpenSolar Podcast, host Andrew Birch speaks with Preeti Bajaj, CEO of Luminous India, about one of the fastest-growing solar markets in the world.
The conversation explores why India’s rooftop solar market may be entering its most important growth phase yet, and why its path could look very different from the US, Europe, or Australia.
Also available to stream on Apple and Spotify.
How India’s solar journey really started
Preeti’s path into solar began in Australia, one of the earliest markets to adopt rooftop systems at scale. Watching rooftop panels turn homes into miniature power stations, she became convinced that energy generation was shifting away from centralised utilities and into the hands of consumers.
That experience still shapes how she sees India today — not just as a technology transition, but as a way for households to gain more control over how they access and manage electricity.
The policy that accelerated everything
India’s solar growth has been building for years, but a clear inflection point came when the government committed to installing rooftop solar on 10 million homes.
With subsidies covering up to half the system cost, and some states offering even more, payback periods in parts of India fell from roughly four years to closer to two. Rooftop solar suddenly became financially viable for millions of households that had previously been priced out of the market.
The scale of that target created something India’s rooftop market had previously lacked: predictable demand. That gave manufacturers confidence to expand local production, encouraged financing activity, and made it viable for installers to grow beyond fragmented regional operations.
But as Preeti points out, building an industry around subsidies is not the same thing as building a durable market.
Despite the momentum, India is still early in its rooftop solar transition. Solar penetration remains below 1% across roughly 340 million households, meaning even modest increases in adoption could translate into millions of additional installations over the next decade.
A completely different cost reality
One of the biggest differences between India and more mature markets is cost. In the US, a residential system can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to install. In India, systems are closer to $1,000 and can often be installed within hours.
That radically different cost structure changes the economics of adoption entirely. Rooftop solar in India is less constrained by financing complexity or lengthy permitting processes, and more dependent on maintaining quality and trust across a highly fragmented installer market.
Competition is intense, consumers are highly price-sensitive, and product performance matters enormously in a market operating at this scale.
Building India’s industry as it scales
India’s rooftop solar market is expanding at extraordinary speed, but much of the industry infrastructure is still being built in parallel.
“We are building the plane while flying it,” Preeti says.
Unlike more mature solar markets, India is simultaneously scaling deployment while developing the installer networks, technical workforce, supply chains, and operational systems needed to support long-term growth.
That challenge is magnified by the sheer complexity of the market itself: 28 states, thousands of local jurisdictions, multiple languages, and regions where infrastructure can still be inconsistent.
Why energy independence already matters
In many Western markets, home batteries are still treated as a premium upgrade. In India, inverter-battery systems have been a household necessity for decades because of inconsistent grid reliability, which gives India a very different starting point for residential energy storage adoption.
Preeti puts it simply: “Being self-reliant for power is something consumers are used to.”
That familiarity matters. Rooftop solar feels less like a behavioural shift and more like an extension of an existing habit of managing power reliability at the household level.
The next shift may be batteries
Net metering still dominates across most of India, meaning homeowners are primarily rewarded for exporting excess solar back to the grid. As markets like California and Australia have shown, that can slow battery adoption by reducing the financial incentive to store energy at home.
But that may not last forever. Time-of-use electricity pricing — where power becomes more expensive during peak demand periods — has been widely discussed in India and was expected to begin rolling out in 2025, though implementation has so far been delayed.
Preeti believes the shift is still coming. If it does, the economics of storage could change quickly. Combined with India’s existing familiarity with backup batteries and growing pressure on the grid during peak demand, the foundations for a large-scale battery market may already be forming.
What happens after the 10 million target
The government’s target is driving growth today, but it won’t define the long-term market.
“The challenge… is that we don’t become a subsidy-dependent industry,” Preeti says.
The long-term test will be whether rooftop solar continues to make economic sense once subsidies eventually decline, and whether companies can continue scaling on the strength of economics, reliability, and consumer demand rather than policy support alone.
So, is India the next solar superpower?
India has the scale, the demand, and the momentum.
The country is still early in its rooftop solar transition, but the conditions driving growth are now aligning at enormous scale: rising electricity demand, improving affordability, strong policy support, and a population already familiar with managing energy independently.
There is also a growing sense of national ambition behind the energy transition, particularly around expanding domestic manufacturing capacity and reducing reliance on imported energy technologies.
If adoption continues accelerating, India may not just become one of the world’s largest solar markets, but one of the most influential examples of how emerging economies electrify.