Gujarat cut the fee for parking spare wind and solar on the grid by a third
A power company that misses the data deadline cannot charge the fee at all, and is docked 1 paisa for every unit it handled that year.
Gujarat has cut the fee that large electricity users pay to leave spare solar and wind power on the state grid and draw it back later. From 1 September it costs Rs 1 for each unit parked, down from Rs 1.50. A unit is one kilowatt-hour, the thing every bill is counted in.
Who pays it
The arrangement is called banking: you push your own generation into the grid in one hour and claim the credit in another. Gujarat opens it only to users whose connection is approved for 100 kW or more, so factories, cold stores and telecom towers use it. Households with rooftop panels sit under separate rules.
The credit perishes. Any balance still banked when the calendar month ends is written off, power banked in off-peak hours cannot be drawn at peak hours, and the running total may never exceed 30 per cent of what the user buys from its power company that month.
A stopgap that ran two years
Rs 1.50 was fixed in February 2024 and meant to lapse that September, once a study of what banking costs the power companies was finished. The study ran long. The rate was carried over five times, through five successive amendments to the same regulations, before this one replaced it.
No data, no fee
From April 2027 the rate is to be rebuilt each year from 15-minute readings of what every banking user injected and drew, set against what the power company earned or spent as a result. A company that misses the filing deadline, or files partial figures, cannot charge anything until it files properly.
The regulator then treats that company as having earned 1 paisa on every unit it handled during the year, scaled to the days its fee sat at zero, and takes the amount off what it is allowed to collect from customers. The regulator said this keeps the cost of a late filing off everyone else's bills.
Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam, the state company that owns four of Gujarat's power companies, objected, and so did the private licensee Torrent Power. The state company said a zero fee would strip it of costs it had already borne, and asked for 60 to 90 days to file instead of 30. The regulator kept the zero.
The rate rests on ten months
Developers told the hearing the study behind Rs 1 was thin: ten months of readings, from April 2025 to January 2026, drawn mostly from one power company and covering a single monsoon wind season. One asked for two to three full years before the formula binds anyone.
Continuum Green Energy said three probability terms sitting inside the formula have no historical basis yet. Torrent Power, which wanted the cut reviewed before it was made, said Gujarat already carries about 47,000 MW of renewable capacity, more than any other state, and that the swings leave its fixed costs unrecovered.
From April 2027 the computed rate cannot fall below Rs 0.50 or rise above Rs 1.50.
For a factory parking 1 lakh units a month (our arithmetic): the fee falls from Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 1 lakh, a saving of Rs 50,000 a month. From April 2027 the same factory is exposed to anything between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1.5 lakh, because of that floor and ceiling.
In Gujarat a factory may use the power it generated six hours ago, for Rs 1 a unit, and from 2027 the company that owns the wires has to justify that price. The format and the deadlines for the data have still to be published.
Parking spare solar on Gujarat's grid now costs Rs 1 a unit, and from 2027 the power companies must prove that price or charge nothing.
What we could not confirm
- What figure did the regulator's own study produce before the rate was set at Rs 1?
- How much power do Gujarat's banking users leave on the grid in a year, and what did it cost the power companies?
- Has any Indian power company yet lost a banking charge for missing a data deadline?
The document
Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission (Terms and Conditions for Green Energy Open Access) (Sixth Amendment) Regulations, 2026, notified as No. 07 of 2026 and published in the Gujarat Government Gazette, Extraordinary, Part IV-C, Extra No. 461 on 19 August 2026, signed by Secretary Ranjeeth Kumar J. Read with the Commission's Statement of Reasons of the same date, before Chairman Pankaj Joshi with Members Hiren Shah and Jatin Thakkar.
- The notification, Gujarat Government Gazette, 19 August 2026: https://gercin.org/viewdocument/TmV3TmV3c18xMDdfMTc4NzMwMzkzOA==
- The Statement of Reasons, 19 August 2026: https://gercin.org/viewdocument/TmV3TmV3c18xMDhfMTc4NzMwMzk3OQ==
- Energetica India, 27 August 2026: https://www.energetica-india.net/news/gujarat-reduces-green-energy-open-access-banking-charge-to-inr-1-per-kwh
- Mercom India, 31 August 2026: https://www.mercomindia.com/gujarat-energy-banking-reform-reduces-near-term-costs-for-open-access
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