Today’s feed is led by regulation rather than procurement, and it is the more consequential of the two. The Central Electricity Authority has floated a storage mandate for new solar and wind projects — a rule that, if it lands, changes the arithmetic of every renewable bid rather than adding one more tender to the pile. The live procurement list is unchanged and sits on our tender tracker.
Policy: a mandate, not a tender
- CEA’s Proposed Storage Mandate Could Reshape Solar and Wind Project Economics — Mercom India
- Kerala Drafts Tariff Framework for Energy Storage, Generation and Transmission — Mercom India
- From renewable capacity to renewable reliability — pv magazine India
A storage mandate works differently from a storage tender. A tender buys a fixed quantity once; a mandate makes storage a standing line item in every project that follows, which pushes demand into the market continuously and, just as importantly, moves the cost from a specialist procurement into the generator’s own capital plan. That is the same mechanism as the energy storage obligation already applied to distribution licensees, pointed at generation instead. Kerala’s draft tariff framework is the state-level counterpart — the point at which a commission decides how a battery’s cost is recovered — and we track the state-by-state picture in our India BESS policy overview. The pv magazine piece frames the underlying shift in one phrase worth borrowing: the target is no longer capacity, it is reliability, which is precisely the gap our note on India’s evening peak storage gap sets out.
Tenders still open
No new tender was floated today. Two procurements remain worth a bid team’s attention.
- SECI Seeks 100 MWh Standalone Storage for Short-Term Use — Mercom India · read our brief
- NLC India Selects Consultant for 600 MW Solar Plus Storage Project — Mercom India
SECI’s requirement is short-term and standalone, which usually means a system judged on how fast it can be delivered and energised rather than on a twenty-year levelised tariff — a different bid posture from the long-duration packages covered in our guide to SECI standalone storage tenders. NLC India is still at consultant stage, before a tender document exists, and that remains the most useful moment for a supplier to get specifications in front of the people drafting them.
Projects, deals and manufacturing
- Sunsure Energy signs 20 MW PPA with Kajaria Ceramics for round-the-clock renewable energy supply — pv magazine India
- Bondada Engineering sets up subsidiary for 225 MW/450 MWh BESS project in Andhra Pradesh — pv magazine India · read our brief
- Fujiyama plans additional 1 GWh lithium battery manufacturing capacity at Ratlam plant — pv magazine India · read our brief
- Solar Leads 248 GW Renewable and Storage Transmission Connectivity Pipeline — Mercom India
Sunsure’s 20 MW round-the-clock contract with Kajaria Ceramics is the day’s other reliability story, arriving through a private contract rather than a regulation: a manufacturer buying firm renewable supply is buying the same thing the CEA proposal would mandate, just paid for commercially — the structure our note on round-the-clock renewable tenders unpacks. Behind both sit the supply-side numbers: ring-fenced project companies on the demand side and domestic gigawatt-hour lines on the supply side. A mandate that attaches storage to every new solar and wind project lands on a cell supply chain that is still being built, and connectivity queues of the scale in the 248 GW pipeline are where that mismatch shows up first — as a commissioning date, not a price. Sourcing, not headline system cost, is what a technical evaluation should be probing, as our FDRE tender framework note explains for the hybrid packages already using this structure.
Tender terms and deadlines change by notification — always verify the current bid documents on the issuing organisation’s portal before acting. The CEA mandate is a proposal at this stage, not a rule in force.
Working out what a storage mandate would do to your project’s numbers, or sizing a system for your own site? Run it through our BESS savings calculator, or talk to our team for a project-specific read.