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A mid-sized forging unit near Pune runs three shifts and pays one of the highest commercial tariffs in its state. Its roof can hold enough panels to cover perhaps a fifth of its consumption. So does solar make sense for a plant like that? It does, but probably not in the way the owner first imagined. Choosing between industrial solar solutions comes down to how much power you use and how much roof you actually have.
With a captive rooftop plant, the panels sit on your own buildings and feed your own load. You own the asset or lease it, and the power never touches the transmission network. That keeps it simple. There are no wheeling or transmission charges, and approvals are lighter than for an offsite plant.
The limit is space. Factory roofs are often shared with ventilators, skylights and utilities, and older sheet roofs may need strengthening. For energy-intensive plants, a captive rooftop system rarely covers more than a fraction of total demand. It’s still worth doing, because rooftop power is usually the cheapest you’ll ever buy, but it often isn’t the whole answer.
Open access solar lets a consumer buy power from a solar plant located elsewhere, often hundreds of kilometres away, and have it delivered through the grid. The plant can be owned by a developer, by you, or by a group of consumers under a group captive structure.
The big shift came with the Green Energy Open Access Rules notified in 2022. They cut the eligibility threshold for green energy open access from 1 MW to 100 kW, which brought many mid-sized manufacturers into the market for the first time. Later amendments allowed that 100 kW to be met through multiple connections in the same electricity division.
Open access isn’t free of costs. Depending on your state, you’ll pay some combination of transmission charges, wheeling charges, cross-subsidy surcharge and standby charges. Banking rules also vary. A good adviser models these for your state before you sign any power purchase agreement, because they decide whether the savings are real.
Put simply, rooftop is cheaper per unit but capped by space, while open access solar scales with your demand but carries grid charges and more paperwork. Here’s how the choice between industrial solar solutions usually breaks down:
For most energy-intensive manufacturers, we think the answer is both. Rooftop takes care of daytime load at the lowest cost, and open access fills the rest.
Nobody has to do everything at once. Many of our industrial clients start with a captive rooftop plant on their best roof, watch the savings for a year, then add open access once the finance team trusts the numbers. That staged route lowers risk and builds internal confidence.
It also gives you time to fix the roofs that aren’t ready. Asbestos sheets, ageing structures and roofs due for replacement in a few years are better dealt with before panels go up, not after. Planning industrial solar solutions in phases lets you schedule that work around production rather than forcing a shutdown.
Expansion plans belong in the conversation too. If a new shed or production line is coming in two years, size the open access contract and the rooftop design with that growth in mind, so you aren’t renegotiating a power purchase agreement the moment demand rises.
Finance and operations teams tend to look at different risks. CFOs want to know about tariff certainty, contract length and exit clauses. Plant heads care about power quality and what happens during maintenance shutdowns. Both are right to ask.
Before committing to any of the industrial solar solutions on the table, get a model that shows your landed cost per unit after every applicable charge, year by year, for at least the first ten years. If a proposal only shows the generation tariff, it’s hiding the most important numbers.
Tech Solar has been designing and building solar for industrial clients for over 25 years, from rooftop plants on factories and warehouses to larger utility-scale and marine projects. Our in-house EPC team handles structural assessment, design, installation and O&M, and we help clients evaluate open access options alongside captive rooftop.
If you’re weighing industrial solar solutions for your plant, start with twelve months of bills and a roof survey. Talk to our team about an assessment, and we’ll show you what rooftop can cover, what open access could add, and what the combined landed cost looks like for your state.
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