Three ways to cut your factory's power bill — and how to tell which is yours

Rooftop solar you don't pay for, buying green power through open access, or taking a stake in a plant through group captive. They are not competing sales pitches, they are three different answers to three different situations. This page tells you which situation is yours before anyone quotes you anything.

Start with three numbers

Almost every C&I power decision in India comes down to these. Get them in front of you and the answer usually picks itself.

• Your sanctioned load or contracted demand, in kW. It is printed on your electricity bill. This decides whether open access is even open to you.
• Your usable roof area, in square feet — shadow-free, structurally sound, and not about to be rebuilt. This caps how much rooftop solar can do for you.
• When you actually consume. A single day shift and a round-the-clock plant get very different answers, and this is the number people skip.

The threshold most factory owners get wrong

If you looked into open access a few years ago and were told your plant was too small, that answer is probably out of date.

The Green Energy Open Access Rules notified in June 2022 cut the entry threshold from 1 MW to 100 kW of contracted demand or sanctioned load. Connections belonging to you within the same electricity division can be added together to reach it. And for captive and group captive consumers, there is no load limit at all.

That single change moved open access from something only large plants could use to something a mid-sized unit can. We still meet owners who ruled themselves out on the old 1 MW figure and never rechecked.

The three routes

Side by side

Illustrative default values — request a site-specific quotation. Charges, banking rules and approval timelines differ by state and change with each tariff order.

Where the open access saving actually goes

A generator quotes you a low rate per unit and it looks decisive. It is not the number that matters. What lands on your bill is that rate plus wheeling charges, cross-subsidy surcharge, additional surcharge, transmission losses and banking terms — and those are set by your state commission, not by the generator.

In some states those charges leave a genuine saving. In others they eat most of it. This is the single reason we will not quote a percentage saving on this page: it is a state-by-state answer, and anyone giving you a national number is selling rather than advising.

Group captive exists precisely because of this. Meeting the 26% equity and 51% consumption tests under Rule 3 of the Electricity Rules 2005 exempts you from cross-subsidy surcharge and additional surcharge — usually the two largest. The trade is that you must hold that equity and prove the consumption every year, or you lose captive status and the charges come back.

When none of these is the right answer

Worth saying plainly, because it applies more often than the industry admits:

• Your load is mostly at night. Solar cannot help much with a load that runs after dark. Where your state allows banking, open access recovers part of it — but a rooftop plant sold to you on a night-shift load will disappoint.
• You are moving premises within a few years. A rooftop plant does not move with you. Open access does.
• Your tariff is already subsidised or very low. If your effective rate is well below commercial industrial tariffs, the gap that pays for all of this may not exist. Check before you spend time on it.
• Your roof needs work. An ageing roof sheet due for replacement should be replaced first. Putting a twenty-five year plant on it is an expensive way to postpone a repair.

What we do, and what we do not

We manufacture solar equipment and we facilitate these arrangements. To be exact about the last one: Aran is not a power trader. We do not buy electricity and sell it on. What we do is connect a consumer with a generator, help you compare the routes with every charge visible, and handle the paperwork the arrangement needs. The electricity contract is between you and the generator.

For rooftop under the zero-investment model, we supply the equipment, the material and the maintaining engineers, and work with a partner near your site for survey, installation, commissioning and DISCOM liaisoning — which is how a project several states away gets executed by people who are actually near it.

Common questions

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