Technology Bringing About A Paradigm Shift In Solar Industry

BW Businessworld’s Anurit Kanti sits down with Kunwer Sachdev — the Su-Kam founder on why the economics of solar are turning irreversible, and how technology is quietly rewriting the Indian solar industry ahead of the 2022 and 2030 government targets.

BW Businessworld’s Anurit Kanti catches Sachdev at a moment when Indian solar is graduating from ‘pilot’ to ‘mainstream’. Su-Kam has just under five years of hard growth behind it in solar, and the government’s 100 GW-by-2022 (and long-view 2030) targets are pulling the whole industry forward. The interview is about the plumbing behind that shift: the numbers, the technology, and the policy work that is still not done.

Why solar economics have flipped

The core argument Sachdev makes: tariffs on grid electricity keep rising every year while solar prices keep plummeting. That crossover is what is really driving the shift — not sentiment, not policy speeches. The upfront cost of a system is still meaningful, but recovery starts immediately as the buyer stops paying the utility, and everything after payback is essentially free power.

Technology as the paradigm shift

The interview’s headline claim is that the industry’s next leg is not price-led but technology-led — smarter inverters, better MPPT charge controllers, hybrid on-grid/off-grid systems, and battery storage that finally makes a rooftop dispatchable rather than intermittent. Sachdev’s point to BW: this is where Su-Kam is spending its engineering hours, because the mature solar buyer will pay for ‘uptime’, not for panels.

“What is drawing people towards solar energy is that it is a great way to save money — the yearly rise of electricity tariff, as opposed to the plummeting price of solar, is one of the main reasons fuelling the growth of solar power.”— Kunwer Sachdev, Founder & MD, Su-Kam • BW Businessworld, 17 April 2018

Government targets — and the last-mile bottleneck

Sachdev backs the 2022 and 2030 targets but pushes BW’s readers to look at the operational reality: subsidy paperwork is still complicated, net-metering approvals still stretch, and some state DISCOMs are quietly hostile to distributed solar. His fix — the one he keeps repeating — is a single, unified, centralised clearance process, so a homeowner willing to solarise their roof does not need a project manager to navigate three departments.