Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: India added a record 29 GW of solar and wind capacity in the first half of 2026 — a figure large enough to change the arithmetic of the country’s 2030 commitment rather than merely to advance it. Solar additions surged 43%, driven substantially by rooftop installations under the PM Surya Ghar scheme. Total installed renewable capacity stood at 288.58 GW as of June 2026: solar 162.15 GW, wind 57.44 GW and hydropower 57.24 GW. India now ranks third globally in installed renewable capacity.
The state-level concentration is worth reading closely because it is where the investment case sits. Gujarat contributed 7.6 GW of solar in the first half, or 29% of the national total; Rajasthan added 6.6 GW, a further 25%. More than half the country’s solar build is happening in two states, which is efficient in the short run — land, irradiance and evacuation infrastructure are all better there — and a concentration risk in the long run, because it loads a single transmission corridor and a single weather regime with an outsized share of national generation.
Two states, half the build: Gujarat and Rajasthan together accounted for 54% of India’s solar additions in the first half of 2026, concentrating both the opportunity and the grid-planning problem.
Generation capacity is now the easy part of India’s energy transition. The scarce assets from here are transmission lines, storage hours and a distribution company that can pay its bills.
At a Glance
• H1 2026 additions: a record 29 GW of solar and wind
• Solar additions: up 43%, led by rooftop growth under PM Surya Ghar
• Installed RE capacity: 288.58 GW as of June 2026
• Mix: solar 162.15 GW; wind 57.44 GW; hydro 57.24 GW
• State leaders: Gujarat 7.6 GW (29% of solar additions); Rajasthan 6.6 GW (25%)
• Full-year expectation: around 47 GW of new solar and wind in calendar 2026
• Target: 500 GW of non-fossil electricity capacity by 2030
• Global rank: India third in installed renewable capacity
The rooftop component deserves separate attention from an industry perspective, because it changes who the customer is. A utility-scale solar park is a project-finance transaction with one offtaker, one construction contract and a twenty-five-year power purchase agreement. A rooftop programme at PM Surya Ghar’s scale is a consumer-durables business: millions of small transactions, each requiring a financed household, an installer, an inspection, a net-metering approval and after-sales service. That builds a very different industrial base — distributed installers, small-ticket lenders, local service networks — and it is far more employment-intensive per megawatt than a utility park. It is also considerably harder to keep at a consistent quality, which is where the sector’s reputational risk now lies.
With around 47 GW expected across calendar 2026 and the 500 GW non-fossil target for 2030 tracking on schedule, the binding constraints have moved decisively downstream. Three of them are worth naming for anyone allocating capital to the sector: transmission, where the inter-state corridors out of the western solar belt must be commissioned in step with generation or curtailment will erode project returns; storage, where the value of an evening megawatt-hour increasingly exceeds that of a midday one and battery and pumped-hydro tenders are now the more interesting part of the market; and distribution company finances, since a renewable project’s cash flow is ultimately only as reliable as the discom that signs its cheque. India has demonstrated it can build generation at world-leading speed. The constructive agenda — accelerated transmission approvals, a deeper storage procurement pipeline, and continued discom reform — is well understood, and the returns to executing it are now larger than the returns to adding another gigawatt of panels.