The Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) — a central government company under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy — runs the auctions that set the reference price for battery storage in India. Its standalone storage tenders are the ones to watch: a “standalone” battery has no co-located solar or wind farm attached. It is a pure storage asset that charges from the grid and discharges back to it, sold as a service. This is the model behind most of our standalone BESS projects.
These tenders matter beyond the winners, because the tariff SECI discovers in each round becomes the number everyone else — states, DISCOMs (distribution companies), private buyers — negotiates against. And that number has fallen dramatically.
What SECI is actually buying
SECI does not usually buy the electricity stored in the battery. It buys contracted capacity — the right to call on a battery of a given size (say 250 MW for 2 hours) whenever the grid needs it. The developer builds, owns and operates the battery, and gets paid a fixed capacity charge, quoted in ₹ per MW per month, for keeping that capacity available and cycled reliably.
SECI acts as the intermediary. It signs a storage purchase agreement with the developer, then leases that contracted capacity onward to state DISCOMs through back-to-back agreements. The DISCOM gets on-demand peak power without building or financing the battery itself; SECI carries the counterparty risk in the middle. India’s very first standalone tender, the 500 MW/1000 MWh round at the Fatehgarh grid substation in Rajasthan (issued April 2022), was designed exactly this way — storage for DISCOMs on an “on-demand” basis.
The reverse auction: bidding the price down
SECI standalone tenders are reverse auctions — the lowest bid wins. There are two formats you will see, and it helps to know the difference:
- Capacity-charge bidding (₹/MW/month). Developers quote the monthly charge they need to keep the battery available. Lowest bidder wins the capacity.
- VGF bidding (₹/MWh of subsidy). Where the tender is backed by Viability Gap Funding, developers instead bid down the grant they need. The one asking for the least government support wins. This is explained fully in our VGF scheme deep-dive.
Both formats end up in the same place: relentless downward pressure on the price DISCOMs pay. Falling cell prices and hungry bidding on either the charge or the subsidy pull in the same direction.
How far tariffs have fallen
The headline story of these tenders is the collapse in discovered price. SECI’s first standalone auction in 2022 attracted bids reported around ₹10.83 lakh/MW/month — expensive enough that the market barely moved. By SECI’s 1,000 MW/2,000 MWh auction won by JSW Neo Energy and Reliance Power, winning quotes had crashed to roughly ₹3.81 lakh/MW/month. Later 2-hour rounds settled lower still, with 2025 tenders reported near ₹2.5–2.85 lakh/MW/month, some without any VGF at all.
The most recent tranche shows how mature the market has become. In March 2026, SECI concluded a 125 MW/500 MWh standalone auction for Odisha, offtaken by GRIDCO, with Coal India and Onward Solar Power winning at ₹3.04–3.75 per kW per month (that is roughly ₹3.0–3.75 lakh/MW/month) — a longer, 4-hour duration round, which naturally prices higher than the older 2-hour tenders. You can follow live rounds on our tender tracker.
Who can bid
SECI standalone tenders are open, but not trivial to enter. Typical eligibility requirements across recent Requests for Selection include:
- Minimum net worth — commonly benchmarked at around ₹1–2 crore per MW of the capacity bid for, so bidders must be well capitalised.
- Consortium bidding allowed — companies can bid jointly, with the lead member usually required to hold a minimum stake (often 26%).
- Technical and performance commitments — projects must guarantee high availability (the 2022 tender required 95% annual availability and a minimum 85% monthly round-trip efficiency), with liquidated damages for shortfalls.
- Delivery discipline — a hard commissioning deadline, typically 18 months from signing the purchase agreement, and financial guarantees at bid and performance stages.
In practice, winners have ranged from large IPPs (independent power producers) like JSW Neo and Reliance Power to public-sector firms such as Coal India — a sign the field is opening up as risk becomes better understood.
What this means for you
- If you are a developer or EPC: the entry bar is capital and delivery credibility, not novelty. Model your bid around the two formats — a lean capacity charge, or the lowest VGF you can survive on — and build in the availability and round-trip-efficiency guarantees from the start, because liquidated damages bite. If you supply rather than bid, our grid-scale product range is built to these SECI performance specs.
- If you are a DISCOM or state utility: SECI-tendered capacity is often the cheapest firm peak power you can access without financing a battery yourself — the whole leasing structure exists to hand you that capacity at the discovered tariff.
- If you are a private C&I (commercial and industrial) buyer: you will not bid in these tenders, but the tariffs they discover set the market reference for your own behind-the-meter economics.
Tender terms — eligibility thresholds, durations, VGF caps and deadlines — change by notification, and SECI has already shifted from 2-hour to 4-hour rounds and revised VGF ceilings more than once. Treat the figures here as a July 2026 snapshot and confirm the live Request for Selection before you commit. To size what storage could save on your own site, or to talk through a SECI-linked project, try our BESS savings calculator or get in touch.
Policy snapshot as of July 2026. Tender terms, tariffs and eligibility change by SECI notification; verify current provisions in the live Request for Selection before financial decisions.