Round-the-clock (RTC) and firm and dispatchable renewable energy (FDRE) are gaining traction, with newer commercial and industrial (C&I) consumers evaluating projects based on how efficiently they can match future power demand.

In an exclusive interview with Mercom India, Kartikeya Narain Sharma, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer at Sunsure Energy, discussed the growing demand for RTC and FDRE projects, the factors driving this shift, the regulatory changes needed to support their deployment, and the role of domestic battery manufacturing in improving project economics.

Sunsure Energy has positioned itself as an RTC renewable energy provider rather than a conventional solar developer. How do you see RTC solutions changing the way C&I consumers procure renewable energy?

Sunsure’s strategic positioning aligns with market trends. As the renewable energy industry matures, C&I customers are shifting from a capacity-led model to an outcome-led model. This means they now seek reliable power that’s predictable, competitively priced, and has a low carbon footprint.

An RTC renewable energy project builds on renewable power sources like solar and wind, combining them intelligently with storage to counter their variability, deploying tech to forecast energy management (demand and supply) under variable weather scenarios, and matching the remainder with merchant market procurement strategies.

Load curve and Time-Of-Day matching are becoming central to how customers evaluate renewable energy solutions. We believe that over time, successful developers will be those who can optimize the entire portfolio of solar, wind, storage, and grid power around a customer’s consumption profile.

India is rapidly expanding battery energy storage, but most battery cells are still imported. How do you see this dependence affecting project economics, deployment timelines, and the scalability of RTC renewable energy over the next five years?

India’s need for battery storage is well documented. But at the same time, the global storage market remains heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains and manufacturing capacity. This means storage costs will remain exposed to the availability, pricing, and broader supply dynamics of Chinese manufacturing.

For India, sustainably lowering costs will require either diversifying global supply chains to reduce dependence on China or developing indigenous manufacturing capabilities at scale.

Our view is that this is a transitional challenge. I say this because, in the next five years, domestic cell manufacturing will acquire scale, reducing India’s dependence on and exposure to global supply shocks. The technology and design will continue to improve, bringing down the cost per delivered MWh, and developers will also gain real-world experience, improving their ability to optimize storage size and duty cycle.

Over the next five years, we expect costs to come down. RTC should be seen as designing the lowest-cost portfolio capable of delivering the required reliability for Indian industry.

What factors are driving utilities to procure more hybrid, FDRE, and RTC renewable energy projects, and how do you expect this trend to reshape India’s renewable energy market?
The economics of renewable energy remain a key driver.

Over the long term, renewable power remains more cost-competitive than conventional sources, but how power is procured is changing. Advances in renewable energy technologies, particularly the combination of hybrid generation and storage, now make it possible to procure renewable power in a much firmer and dispatchable form.

For utilities, this creates an important economic advantage. Instead of procuring large amounts of conventional capacity to meet relatively short periods of peak demand, they can increasingly use renewable energy with storage to meet specific requirements, for example, the four-hour evening peak.

Such power firming projects can be more economical than paying for standby capacity from gas-based peaking plants that may be used only for a limited number of hours.

It becomes particularly relevant as electricity demand grows across states and India battles more intense heatwaves and residential & commercial power loads.

Importantly, rising demand does not necessarily mean that utilities need more baseload capacity at all times. Much of the incremental requirement can be concentrated during particular periods of the day. Hybrid, FDRE, and RTC projects allow utilities to match supply more closely to these demand patterns, effectively providing power when it is needed rather than paying for capacity that may remain underutilized.

How are procurement decisions among C&I consumers evolving as more businesses pursue net-zero targets? Beyond electricity tariffs, what role do integrated energy solutions that combine solar, wind, storage, and energy management play in their decision-making?

Traditional C&I customers came from industries such as steel, cement, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and others, where power demand was largely fixed or, if not fixed, easily ascertainable.

Now, as the economy grows, we are seeing an entirely new set of customers such as data centers, hyperscalers, electric vehicle charging and battery swapping, and component manufacturing.

The convergence of demand from both customer sets is driving the evolution of C&I demand.

While traditional industries seek firm, reliable power, newer industries want a well-defined roadmap and a clear structure for how their demand will be met over the next five years.

From a developer’s point of view, these renewable energy projects are about intelligent solutions that can be planned and scaled to meet a customer’s business needs.

Second, the decision to source green power is driven by market economics. Beyond price, customers want long-term energy partners equipped to match their daily load curve, year-on-year growth in power demand, and credible renewable energy offset credits.

What policy, regulatory, or market reforms would have the greatest impact on accelerating RTC renewable energy deployment and battery storage integration across India’s C&I sector?

We would focus on five priorities. Storage should be compensated not only for energy delivered, but also for capacity, peak management, ancillary services, and grid balancing. Generation and evacuation cannot continue to be planned as separate systems.

Developers and financiers can price risk when they know the rules. Frequent changes to banking, open-access charges, or eligibility can add significant risk premiums to otherwise competitive projects.

Where storage provides a clear system benefit, mechanisms such as transmission-charge treatment and targeted viability gap support like Viability Gap Funding for C&I consumers can accelerate deployment without creating permanent dependence on subsidies, and offer PPA parity between utility and open access.

The regulatory and policy view, therefore, should treat C&I contracts as the sector’s next phase of development and provide similar policy and regulatory support as utility projects.