Series · Project 02 · Off-Grid & Storage
By Kunwer Sachdev · Founder, Su-Kam Power Systems · April 2026
In March 2014, Su-Kam commissioned a 45 kWp off-grid solar photovoltaic plant at the Ujjayanta Market Complex in the heart of Agartala. On a capacity basis, it was a modest installation — one-thirtieth the size of our PEC Chandigarh project, commissioned the following year. On a symbolic basis, it was something else entirely: the anchor project of Agartala’s bid to become the first solar city in North-East India, and Su-Kam’s first solar installation in Tripura.
A state that had to build its own grid from the sky
To understand why the Ujjayanta Market plant mattered, you have to understand what Tripura was dealing with in 2014. The state sits in the geographical corner of India — bordered on three sides by Bangladesh, cut off from the rest of the country by a narrow corridor through Assam. Grid power reached Tripura late and unevenly. Outages were a routine feature of daily life. In some districts, hospitals were still delivering babies by candlelight.
The Tripura Renewable Energy Development Agency (TREDA), the state nodal agency for renewable energy, had a specific, ambitious plan. Under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s Solar City Programme, TREDA and the Agartala Municipal Corporation had drawn up a master plan to make Agartala the first solar city in the North-East region of India. The Ujjayanta Market installation was chosen as the programme’s flagship — a visible, public anchor that would show the city’s residents that solar was not a lab experiment but a working part of their daily commerce.
TREDA awarded Su-Kam the contract to commission, install, and maintain the plant. It was our first solar project in Tripura, and it committed us to a part of the country where most of our competitors had no service presence at all.
Why off-grid mattered here
The Ujjayanta Market plant is not a grid-tied installation. It is off-grid — solar panels feeding into battery storage, with the stored energy powering the market’s loads directly. This matters.
In 2014 — and in much of the North-East even today — grid reliability could not be assumed. A grid-tied solar plant produces power only when the grid itself is up; if the grid fails, the solar inverter shuts down for safety reasons and the solar array effectively becomes useless at the exact moment power is most needed. Off-grid architecture, with batteries, keeps producing regardless of what the grid does. For a commercial market with hundreds of small traders depending on refrigeration, lighting, and point-of-sale systems, that was the whole point.
Su-Kam had been designing battery-backed power systems since 1998. That was our native strength long before we entered solar. When the solar boom arrived in India, most of the attention — and most of the press — went to grid-tied utility-scale plants, because those were the projects that scaled into the hundreds of megawatts. But for the half of India that still lived with unreliable grid power, off-grid storage was the only solar that actually worked. Ujjayanta Market was the public proof of that thesis.
45 kWp Off-Grid Capacity ~25% Of Market Load 1st Solar City in NE India
The ripple effect across Tripura
The Ujjayanta Market plant was not a standalone project. Under the same Solar City master plan, TREDA rolled out companion installations across Agartala: a 25 kWp plant at the B. R. Ambedkar combined ST/SC Girls’ Hostel, a 5 kWp plant at the Maharani Tulsibati No. 1 ST Girls’ Hostel in Krishnanagar, 14 rooftop installations across various government offices aggregating 23 kW of captive capacity, and solar lanterns distributed to more than 70,000 households across the state.
And beyond Agartala, the solar-hospital rollout that the Discovery Channel documentary Sun Fuel India later chronicled — more than 90 hospitals in the region outfitted with solar panels to guarantee round-the-clock power for patients — followed the same off-grid, battery-backed pattern. In a state where a hospital losing power for an hour could mean a life lost, the technical choice of off-grid storage was not an engineering preference. It was a medical necessity.
In the earlier stage, at Tripura hospitals, babies were delivered in candlelight. Today, with the onset of solar power, things are arranged in a well-mannered way and equipped for any medical emergency.
That was what I told the trade press at the time. It was not a marketing line. It was what the doctors who used the systems told us.
Why am I telling this story
When people today talk about Indian solar, they talk about gigawatt-scale plants in Rajasthan and Gujarat. Those projects matter. But the Indian solar revolution did not start there. It started in places like Agartala — small, stubborn, politically distant, operationally difficult — where the choice was not between solar and cheap grid power, but between solar and no power at all.
Su-Kam’s Ujjayanta Market plant had a capacity of 45 kilowatts. On a national scale, it was a rounding error. On the scale of a market with hundreds of traders, a city with a solar-city ambition, and a state that had been told for decades that it was too remote to reliably electrify, it was a genuine beginning.
Small plant. Large precedent.
What came next
Agartala’s solar-city programme went on to become a template cited by other state nodal agencies in the North-East. Tripura’s hospital electrification programme expanded. And Su-Kam’s work in the region grew from this one market installation into the eventual 1.3 MW contract for the Indian Army and Assam Rifles — 18 sites across Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura, Mizoram, and Assam — which is the subject of a later post in this series.
Every one of those Army and Assam Rifles sites was off-grid. Every one of them depended on battery storage. Every one of them ran on the same architectural principle that Ujjayanta Market proved in 2014: that for the half of India the grid had failed, the answer was not a better grid. The answer was solar plus storage.
The verified record
Primary Sources — Ujjayanta Market & Tripura Solar City
- Business Standard (Press Trust of India), 14 March 2014 — “Su-Kam makes its first solar installation in Tripura”: business-standard.com
- Tripura Renewable Energy Development Agency (TREDA) — official government page listing the 45 kWp Ujjayanta Market plant as part of the Agartala Solar City Master Plan: treda.tripura.gov.in/solar
- SustainabilityZero, May 2014 — “Modi’s dream of solar-powered India takes shape in Tripura” (confirms 25% of Ujjayanta Market load met by the plant and Agartala’s solar-city programme): sustainabilityzero.com
Independent Documentary Evidence
- Discovery Channel, Sun Fuel India (2015) — documentary featuring the Tripura hospital electrification story: youtube.com/watch?v=Q8yhlFvGqTE
Corroborating Coverage
- Saur Energy, 23 January 2016 — “Su-Kam Aims to Empower With Solar Village Lives” (confirms Tripura hospital solar-electrification programme): saurenergy.com
- pv magazine India, 5 March 2018 — interview with Kunwer Sachdev, MD Su-Kam (context on off-grid architecture & battery storage strategy): pv-magazine-india.com
Industry & Policy Context
- Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) — Solar City Programme: mnre.gov.in
This is the second in a series documenting what Su-Kam built — and what I built as its founder — project by project, during the years when India’s solar industry was still being invented. Read the first post: When No One Wanted Solar — The PEC Chandigarh Grid-Tied Rooftop.
Disclaimer & Legal Notice
This post is part of a personal series documenting projects carried out by Su-Kam Power Systems Limited between 1998 and 2019. During this time, I served as its Founder and Managing Director.
Su-Kam Power Systems Limited was admitted to the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, by order of the National Company Law Tribunal, Principal Bench, New Delhi, dated 5 April 2018, in CP (IB)/540 (PB)/2017. The NCLT subsequently passed an order of liquidation dated 3 April 2019 under Section 34(1) of the Code, directing liquidation of the corporate debtor and appointing a Liquidator. I have had no role in the management, operations, or ownership of Su-Kam Power Systems Limited since the commencement of those proceedings.
This blog is a personal, historical record of work executed under my leadership. It is not published on behalf of, nor is it an endorsement of, any person or entity currently carrying on business under the Su-Kam name or any similar trading style. Nothing in this post should be read as a representation, warranty, or recommendation regarding the products, services, affiliations, or business activities of any present-day operator. I assume no responsibility for, and disclaim any association with, such activities.
All factual claims in this post are supported by the publicly available sources cited herein.