Maharashtra's regulator again orders MSEDCL to put a consumer back on net metering, this time an 850 kW pharmaceutical rooftop

Mercom India reported on 22 September 2026 that the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission has ordered the state distribution licensee, MSEDCL, to restore net metering for a pharmaceutical manufacturer's 850 kW rooftop solar system and to reconcile the excess amount it had recovered from the company. That is very nearly the whole of what can be established about the September order. The report is paywalled, so the case number, the order date, the petitioner's name and the amount are not visible. MERC's own public orders page carries a last updated stamp of 21 September 2026 and, when checked on 27 September, rendered the column headers of its orders table with no rows beneath them. The order exists, on Mercom's authority; its text does not appear to be publicly retrievable yet.

What can be sourced properly is the pattern the order belongs to, and the pattern is the story. On 10 June 2026 SaurEnergy reported a MERC order in favour of Lumex Industries, a Pune based automotive component manufacturer running a 999 kW rooftop system. From April 2025 Lumex had also been drawing captive open access power, from Huoban Energy 5 Pvt Ltd. MSEDCL's response was to move the rooftop system off net metering and onto gross metering, crediting its generation at 2.90 rupees per unit from April to June 2025 and 2.82 rupees per unit thereafter. The licensee's argument was procedural: green energy open access approvals routed through the Maharashtra State Load Despatch Centre were, it said, a precondition for the consumer's position.

MERC rejected it on a point that is not really arguable. The gross metering provision MSEDCL was applying had been in the earlier regulations, and under the amended Distribution Open Access Regulations of 2023 it ceased to exist after 10 November 2023. The Commission directed that net metering be extended to Lumex, that the differential be reconciled within 30 days with a supplementary bill adjustment, and that the reconciled credits be passed in the next billing cycle with interest at the bank rate. This was not the first such order and, on Mercom's report, it was not the last. Reporting through 2026 records the same shape of dispute resolved the same way for a C and I consumer seeking simultaneous net metering and open access, and commentary on those orders has settled into the formula that net metering and open access can coexist.

The substantive question in India is therefore not what the rule is. The rule has been clear since November 2023. The question is who bears the cost of a licensee that keeps applying the superseded one. In each of these matters the consumer's remedy arrives through a petition before the state commission: months of process, a lawyer, and a recovery of money the consumer should not have paid, with interest at the bank rate. That remedy is available in practice to a 999 kW automotive plant and an 850 kW pharmaceutical plant. It is not available, in any realistic sense, to a household with a 3 kW system, or to a small workshop, because the cost of obtaining it exceeds the amount in dispute. A right whose enforcement mechanism is priced above the value of the right is a right on paper.

There is a second reading, and it is worth stating because it is the less comfortable one. If a licensee loses the same point repeatedly and continues to apply the old rule to new consumers, the behaviour stops looking like administrative lag. Net metering credits reduce a distribution company's billed units, and gross metering at 2.82 rupees per unit is considerably cheaper for the licensee than crediting exported units against a retail tariff. An error that is expensive for the person who makes it gets corrected quickly. An error that is profitable until challenged does not. Establishing which of those is happening in Maharashtra requires something nobody appears to publish: a count of how many net metering denial petitions MSEDCL has lost at MERC since November 2023, and how many consumers are still being billed the old way without having filed. That number, not any individual order, is what would tell a rooftop owner in Pune what their right is actually worth.