India’s power sector achieved historic benchmarks in 2025 across generation, transmission and distribution, meeting a record peak power demand of 242.49 GW in the 2025–26 financial year while reducing energy shortages to just 0.03 per cent, according to a press release from the Ministry of Power. This marks a sharp improvement from the 4.2 per cent shortage recorded in 2013–14, reflecting sustained infrastructure development and a focus on reliable energy supply for both rural and urban consumers. Official data shows India’s installed power generation capacity has risen by 104.4 per cent since 2014 to 509.743 GW as of November 30. By October 2025, non-fossil fuel sources accounted for 51 per cent of total installed capacity, enabling India to meet its Nationally Determined Contribution target for 2030 five years ahead of schedule. Despite this progress, industry leaders said the Union Budget 2026 presents a critical opportunity to address remaining infrastructure gaps, particularly in transmission. Laxit Awla, Chief Executive Officer of SAEL Industries Ltd, said the budget should frontload investments in transmission infrastructure to improve grid stability and reduce curtailment. He called for faster development of green energy corridors and deployment of grid-scale battery storage backed by long-term offtake commitments to align evacuation capacity with generation growth. Awla also said extending the production-linked incentive scheme across the solar value chain and promoting green financing could attract private capital, scale domestic manufacturing and strengthen sector resilience, helping build the backbone for India’s clean energy ambitions under the Viksit Bharat vision. On the solar sector outlook, Vinay Rustagi, Chief Business Officer at Premier Energies, said renewable energy remains a key government priority and expects supportive measures in Budget 2026. He said flagship programmes such as PM Surya Ghar Yojana and PM KUSUM are likely to see significant scale-up with higher budgetary allocations, along with the expected rollout of PM KUSUM 2.0 featuring enhanced targets and incentives. Rustagi also highlighted the need for incentives for research and development and domestic manufacturing of ingots and wafers to improve self-sufficiency, as well as favourable policy moves on taxes and tariffs for battery storage, which is becoming critical to the power sector. The Ministry of Power release noted that around 178 GW of renewable energy capacity, including large hydro, has been added since April 2014. This comprises about 130 GW of solar, 33 GW of wind, 3.4 GW of biomass, 1.35 GW of small hydro and nearly 9.9 GW of large hydro capacity, underlining India’s commitment to clean energy. Sunil Rathi, Executive Director at Waaree Energies Limited, said Budget 2026 is being viewed as a pivotal moment to advance India’s clean energy transition, with energy storage becoming as central as generation. He said policy support is needed across three pillars: deeper backing for vertically integrated manufacturing across solar, batteries and energy management systems; a more flexible viability framework to enable large-scale storage deployment with solar and hybrid projects; and stronger emphasis on domestic value addition to boost skilled jobs and long-term competitiveness. Rathi said that scaling solar and storage together would allow India to move from capacity creation to system leadership, positioning the country to meet its 2030 targets with confidence and emerge as a global hub for clean energy manufacturing and technology.