Subtext by Zerodha

Mudit Narain on why India throws away free solar power

Episode Summary

In this episode, Kashish and Vishvesh sit down with Mudit Narain, co-founder of Voltseal, to understand the mechanics of India's electricity grid and how batteries are solving the intermittency of renewable energy.

Episode Notes

We cover:

- Why solar power gets curtailed despite its abundance, the evolution of the duck curve, the true cost of cross-subsidizing residential power, and how behind-the-meter storage is re-architecting the grid.

- It also covers India's rapid solar build-out, time-of-day tariffs, open access regulations, the India Energy Stack, and how virtual power plants could turn everyday households into energy suppliers.

 

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction

8:24 Why renewables are intermittent

15:28 History of centralized power plants

21:04 Why solar gets curtailed, not coal

28:50 Sanctioned load and penalty charges

38:23 Time-of-day tariffs explained

48:12 Duck curve becoming a camel curve

53:46 How many hours should a battery store energy?

1:03:07 Net metering and policy bottlenecks

1:11:31 What "open access" really means

1:26:13 Why pilots rarely scale nationally

1:36:24 Closing thoughts on EVs and the energy future