May 27, 2026
The Problem Nobody Talks About Openly
India has committed to 500 GW of non-fossil fuel energy capacity by 2030, a target announced at COP26 and enshrined in the country’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions submitted to the UN in 2022. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has backed this with a plan to bid out 50 GW of renewable capacity every year through FY 2027-28. The C&I sector alone is expected to contribute 75–100 GW of that capacity, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
Corporate sustainability targets are multiplying. The business case for clean energy has never been stronger. And yet, most large commercial and industrial organisations take anywhere from 9 to 18 months to sign a single renewable energy agreement.
That is not a regulatory problem. It is not a vendor problem. It is a decision-making problem, and the root cause sits inside the organisation itself.
If you have sat through a quarterly review where the same RE proposal has been “under evaluation” for the third consecutive quarter, this piece is for you. Here is an honest breakdown of why renewable energy procurement cycles drag on and what the organisations getting it right are doing differently.
Why RE Decisions Are Structurally Harder Than Other Capex Calls
Most capital expenditure decisions in a large organisation follow a familiar path. Finance runs the numbers. Leadership approves. Procurement executes. The process is imperfect, but the roles are clear.
Renewable energy breaks that template in three specific ways:
Multiple Stakeholders, Each With a Different View of the Same Project
A single RE decision touches at least five teams: sustainability, procurement, finance, legal, and operations. Each team evaluates the project through a different lens, using different data, and often produces models that contradict one another.
The sustainability lead is tracking RE utilisation and carbon impact. The CFO is asking about IRR, DSCR, and payback period. The procurement team is comparing vendor proposals that were structured in completely different formats. Legal is reviewing the PPA clauses. Operations wants to know what happens to the energy supply when the solar plant underperforms on a cloudy week.
There is no shared model that speaks to all of them simultaneously. So the project makes a round of the organisation, collecting comments, returning for revisions, and making another round. Each cycle takes weeks. This is the dynamic that platforms like EarthSync are specifically built to collapse by giving every stakeholder a single model with the outputs they each need, rather than five teams running five separate analyses on incompatible assumptions.
The Old Way of Modelling No Longer Works
Until recently, most RE projects were evaluated using monthly or annual energy averages. That was adequate when the grid settled accounts on a monthly basis.
India changed that. The Real-Time Market, introduced by CERC, operates on 15-minute contract blocks. The Deviation Settlement Mechanism (DSM) Regulations, first notified in 2022 and updated since, mean that a generator’s output is measured, matched against declared schedules, and penalised at 15-minute intervals when it deviates. For any Open Access RE project, this makes interval-level accuracy in modelling a commercial necessity, not a technical nicety.
A spreadsheet cannot do this reliably. The numbers it produces are approximations, and experienced finance teams know it. So the proposal goes back for revision. The vendor updates their assumptions. Another four to six weeks pass.
Poor project design, usually a result of inadequate modelling, leads to 1–3% IRR leakage on RE projects. On a project targeting 14% IRR, arriving at 12% is the difference between a deal that clears a finance committee and one that gets sent back for renegotiation.
EarthSync’s engine processes over 50 million data points per simulation at 15-minute resolution, capturing solar generation profiles, battery dispatch cycles, grid interaction, and DSM-adjusted tariff implications in under an hour, the kind of computation that previously required weeks of spreadsheet work across multiple teams.
There Is No Centralised Platform for PPA Discovery and Comparison
The renewable energy procurement market in India remains fragmented. Buyers and Independent Power Producers (IPPs) interact through bilateral conversations, consultants, and informal networks. RFPs go out in different formats. Proposals come back structured differently. There is no standardised basis for comparison.
A procurement team evaluating three solar proposals may receive one structured around the levelised cost of energy (LCoE), one around capacity charges, and one around a blended tariff with escalation clauses. Comparing them means building a new model from scratch, or trusting the vendor’s numbers, which no experienced buyer should do without independent verification.
The result: the evaluation itself becomes a months-long project.
The Hidden Cost of a Slow Decision
The 9–12 month delay in RE procurement is not a neutral inconvenience. It has a measurable financial cost that few organisations calculate explicitly.
Consider an industrial facility with a monthly electricity bill of Rs. 1.5 crore. A well-structured RE project with solar plus battery storage under an Open Access arrangement can realistically deliver 25–35% cost savings. According to landed cost data across Indian states, the gap between grid tariffs and Open Access RE tariffs ranges from Rs. 1.50 to over Rs. 3.00 per unit in high-tariff states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, making the savings case material and calculable.
Every month of delay is Rs. 37–52 lakh in avoidable electricity expense. A nine-month evaluation cycle carries a delay cost of Rs. 3–5 crore before the first kilowatt-hour of renewable energy is consumed.
That number rarely appears in the board presentation. The focus is on the IRR of the project, not the cost of the decision timeline. In practice, both matter.
The Policy Environment That Keeps Moving
One factor that compounds delay is the frequency of policy change in India’s Open Access framework.
The Green Energy Open Access Rules, 2022, brought significant standardisation at the central level, reducing the threshold for Open Access eligibility and capping cross-subsidy surcharges. But state-level implementation has varied considerably. As of early 2026, states continue to revise wheeling charges, banking provisions, and additional surcharge structures at their own pace. Andhra Pradesh issued a second amendment to its Green Energy Open Access Regulations in February 2026, revising how wheeling charges apply to hybrid projects. Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Rajasthan have each adjusted their charge structures in the last two years.
A project evaluated under the policy environment of six months ago may carry materially different economics today. Organisations that treat policy as a one-time checkbox at the start of an evaluation and then proceed on static assumptions are systematically underestimating their landed cost risk.
EarthSync maintains a live policy and regulatory database as part of its modelling engine, allowing landed tariff estimates to be updated in real time as state-level changes occur, rather than requiring a manual rework of the financial model each time a notification is issued.
Three Patterns in Organisations That Move Faster
Across the companies that have closed RE transactions in under six months, three patterns consistently appear.
They Commit to a Shared Model Before They Issue an RFP
The fastest-moving organisations do not issue an RFP and then try to evaluate what comes back. They build an independent techno-economic model first, one that captures their own consumption profile at 15-minute resolution, tests multiple technology combinations across solar, wind, and battery storage, and establishes a baseline against which any proposal can be benchmarked.
This shifts the conversation from “whose numbers do we trust?” to “does this proposal outperform our own model?” That is a much shorter conversation, and it gives procurement teams a position of genuine analytical confidence when they sit across the table from a vendor.
They Give Finance a Model They Can Actually Audit
One of the most reliable ways to slow an RE decision is to present the CFO with an IRR figure produced by a vendor spreadsheet. Finance teams are trained to distrust vendor models, and they should. When the internal analysis lacks a bankable three-statement model (P&L, cash flow, balance sheet), DSCR calculations, and scenario sensitivity analysis, the CFO sends it back for more work.
The organisations that move faster give finance a model built on independent assumptions, stress-tested against multiple scenarios, and structured in a format their own team can interrogate. The conversation moves from “we need more data” to “which scenario do we proceed with?”
They Treat Policy as a Live Input, Not a One-Time Checkbox
Fast-moving organisations do not evaluate policy once at the start and assume it remains stable. They track changes as a live input and update their models accordingly. This avoids the scenario common in slower organisations where a near-complete evaluation is invalidated by a regulatory update, resetting the clock entirely.
What the Next Generation of RE Decision-Making Looks Like
The tools available to RE decision-makers have changed significantly. A project that previously required six weeks of modelling work across three teams can now be evaluated in a scenario run that takes minutes, with optimised capacity recommendations, IRR and LCoE projections, DSM-adjusted tariff estimates, and AI-generated summaries available for internal review.
What EarthSync has built is precisely this: a cloud-native platform that runs sub-hourly simulations across wind, solar, and BESS combinations, optimises using Multi-Integer Linear Programming, surfaces outputs across technical, economic, policy, and impact dimensions simultaneously, and presents them in a format that works for a sustainability lead, a CFO, and a procurement team without each needing a separate model.
The siloes that create delay in RE decision-making are not primarily organisational. They are tooling gaps. When a single platform can produce the consumption analysis, the financial model, the policy-adjusted landed tariff, and the RFP comparison dashboard, the coordination problem that drives 9–18 month cycles becomes significantly more tractable.
The Practical Takeaway
If your organisation’s RE evaluation has been running for more than four months without a decision, ask three questions:
First: Does the team have an independent consumption model built at 15-minute resolution, or is the evaluation working from monthly averages?
Second: Can the finance team audit the IRR and DSCR projections in the current model, or are they relying on vendor-supplied numbers?
Third: When were the policy inputs, open Access charges, DSM structure, banking provisions, last updated, and against which state-level notifications?
Most organisations will find that at least one of these is missing. That gap is where the delay lives.
Conclusion
Renewable energy procurement does not take 9–18 months because the decisions are genuinely complex. It takes that long because the tools, models, and workflows most organisations rely on were not built for the market as it exists today.
India’s energy market operates at 15-minute settlement intervals, across a rapidly shifting policy environment, with technology combinations that multiply scenario complexity significantly. Evaluating it with spreadsheets, siloed teams, and manual data handoffs is a structural mismatch, not a workload problem.
The organisations closing RE deals faster are not necessarily better resourced. They are better equipped. They have a model that processes the actual market, gives every stakeholder the view they need, and turns weeks of back-and-forth into an afternoon of scenario analysis.
If your energy decision has been circling for months, the limiting factor is probably not more time. It is the right tool.
EarthSync’s platform is built specifically for running sub-hourly RE simulations, multi-objective optimisations, and integrated PPA workflows for C&I buyers, IPPs, financiers, and advisors across India. Run your first scenario at earthsync.io.
Key Sources
MNRE / PIB — 50 GW annual RE bidding trajectory, April 2023 https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1913789
India's Nationally Determined Contributions — 500 GW non-fossil fuel target, submitted to UNFCCC, August 2022 https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/NDC/2022-08/India%20Updated%20First%20Nationally%20Determined%20Contrib.pdf
CERC — Deviation Settlement Mechanism and Related Matters Regulations, 2022 (Gazette, effective December 2022) https://cercind.gov.in/Current_reg.html
CERC — Real-Time Market (RTM), 15-minute contract trading framework (operative June 2020) https://cercind.gov.in/Current_reg.html
IEEFA — Impact of Green Energy Open Access Rules, 2022 (December 2024 report, Sharma, Gupta, Moudgil) https://ieefa.org/resources/impact-green-energy-open-access-rules-2022
Mondaq / Trilegal — AP GEOA Second Amendment, February 2026 https://www.mondaq.com/india/renewables/1753588/projects-energy-infrastructure-monthly-newsletter-february-2026
Power Line Magazine — Trends in Green Energy Open Access, April 2024 https://powerline.net.in/2024/04/02/clean-route-trends-in-green-energy-open-access/
BusinessToday / MoSPI Energy Statistics India 2026 — RE installed capacity 172 GW as of March 2025 https://www.businesstoday.in/industry/top-story/story/where-does-india-stand-in-achieving-its-500-gw-renewable-energy-target-by-2030-524678-2026-04-08