One question runs through the whole of today’s feed: does a battery sit next to the generator, on its own, or behind the customer’s meter? The Central Electricity Authority’s proposal, now reported as a co-location requirement, would answer it by rule for every new solar and wind project. SECI, meanwhile, has floated 700 MW of solar for commercial and industrial buyers with no storage attached — a useful marker of where the line currently falls. Live procurements sit on our tender tracker.
New tender: 700 MW of solar, storage not included
- SECI tenders 700 MW of solar capacity for C&I offtake — pv magazine India
The day’s one new procurement is solar-only, and that is precisely what makes it worth a storage supplier’s attention. SECI is aggregating capacity for commercial and industrial buyers — the segment that has been steadily moving from cheap daytime units toward supply it can actually schedule. Plain solar sold to a C&I offtaker delivers energy on the sun’s timetable, not the factory’s, which is the gap that either a firming contract or an on-site battery has to close later. If the CEA proposal below becomes a rule, tenders written this way are the ones whose economics change most.
The CEA proposal sharpens: co-located, not just mandated
- India’s CEA proposes mandatory co-located storage for new solar, wind projects — pv magazine India
Yesterday’s headline was that the CEA had proposed a storage mandate. Today’s reporting adds the word that carries the engineering: co-located. A mandate satisfied anywhere on the system is a procurement question — someone builds a battery somewhere and the obligation is met. A mandate that requires storage at the generating station is a design question, and it lands on the project developer’s own site, single-line diagram and connection agreement.
Co-location has real advantages: the battery shares the plant’s evacuation infrastructure and connectivity, it can capture clipped generation that would otherwise be lost at the inverter, and it is metered as one hybrid resource. It also removes the developer’s option to site storage where the grid needs it most rather than where the panels happen to be. For anyone bidding, the practical effect is that a storage specification stops being an optional add-on and becomes part of the base plant design — the direction our India BESS policy overview tracks, and the same logic already visible in the FDRE tender framework where firming is written into the contract from the start. This remains a proposal, not a rule in force.
Storage on the ground, and still-live procurement
- Solis powers Chennai data center with 1.04 MWh EverCore battery storage system — pv magazine India · read our brief
- 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
The Chennai installation is the third position in the co-location debate and the one policy tends to overlook: storage that belongs to neither the generator nor the grid, but to the load. A data centre buying a megawatt-hour of battery is not arbitraging a tariff — it is buying continuity, and it competes with diesel rather than with a power purchase agreement.
On the procurement side nothing new opened. SECI’s 100 MWh short-term standalone requirement is still the cleanest read on what the system will pay for pure flexibility, and it is standalone by design — a category a co-location mandate does not displace, since firming a plant and balancing a grid are different jobs. NLC India remains at consultant stage on its 600 MW solar-plus-storage project, still the window in which a supplier’s specifications can reach the people drafting the tender.
Tender terms and deadlines change by notification — always verify the current bid documents on the issuing organisation’s portal before acting.
Wondering what a co-location requirement would do to your project’s cost per unit, or sizing a battery for your own load? Run the numbers through our BESS savings calculator, or talk to our team for a project-specific read.