For decades, commercial and industrial facilities in India worked around a familiar energy model: draw power from the grid and maintain backup generation for interruptions. That model continues to serve an important purpose, but what businesses now expect from their energy infrastructure is changing. Reliability remains fundamental, but customers increasingly need power that is flexible, efficient, renewable, and responsive to their specific operating requirements.
Consider how different those requirements have become. A manufacturing facility wants to integrate more renewable energy while managing peak demand and maintaining production continuity. A data centre cannot tolerate power disturbances and is becoming significantly more energy intensive as India's digital economy expands. Metro and railway infrastructure has critical operations that demand dependable power. Commercial facilities are balancing growing electrical loads with sustainability targets, while new loads such as high-power EV charging can create sharp demand peaks.
These applications are very different, but they point toward the same shift. Energy demand is becoming more dynamic and site-specific. The grid remains the foundation, but businesses increasingly need greater control over when they consume power, where that power comes from, when energy should be stored, and how critical loads should be managed.
This is where we see microgrids becoming increasingly relevant. The objective is not to replace the grid, but to build a smarter energy layer around it. A microgrid can bring together grid supply, onsite renewable generation, energy storage, and site loads, coordinating these resources according to the operating requirements of the facility. In our view, this represents the shift from simply consuming electricity to managing energy intelligently at the point of use.
Why Now?
India is not approaching the energy transition gradually. By March 2026, the country had approximately 283 GW of installed non-fossil power capacity, after adding more than 55 GW during FY2025–26. Importantly, India crossed the 50% non-fossil share of cumulative installed electricity capacity in June 2025, five years ahead of its 2030 target under its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement.
This achievement creates the foundation for the next phase of the transition. The question is no longer only how much renewable energy India can build, but how effectively we can integrate, store, and use that energy when demand actually occurs.
At the same time, new forms of electricity demand are emerging rapidly. India's data centre capacity, for example, grew from about 375 MW in 2020 to around 1.5 GW by 2025, with industry projections indicating several-fold expansion toward the end of this decade. Manufacturing electrification, commercial infrastructure, and mobility are creating additional demand patterns that are increasingly concentrated and dynamic.
This makes energy storage increasingly critical to the next phase of India's energy transition. The Central Electricity Authority projects India will require approximately 47 GW / 236 GWh of BESS by 2031–32. This is not simply a long-term ambition; policy support is already moving behind it.
The Government's original BESS viability gap funding programme was launched with an overall outlay of approximately ₹9,400 crore, including ₹3,760 crore of budgetary support. Subsequent VGF programmes are supporting approximately 43.8 GWh of BESS, while the ₹18,100 crore Production Linked Incentive programme for Advanced Chemistry Cells is supporting domestic battery manufacturing capacity.
These developments are creating the conditions for distributed energy infrastructure to scale. Industry estimates point to strong growth in India's microgrid market through the early 2030s, with forecasts indicating strong growth rates annually, increasingly driven by commercial and industrial applications.
That is exactly the gap microgrids can fill: connecting renewable generation, storage, and increasingly complex electricity demand through an intelligent layer closer to where the energy is consumed.
Where Delta Fits In
At Delta, we see a microgrid not as a collection of individual products, but as an integrated energy architecture. Our capabilities across solar power conversion, Power Conversion Systems (PCS), Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), and Energy Management Systems (EMS) provide the core building blocks to connect renewable generation, storage, grid, and site loads.
The EMS becomes the intelligence layer within this architecture, coordinating renewable generation, battery charging and discharging, grid interaction, and site demand. Depending on the application, this can support peak shaving, renewable energy optimization, demand management, energy cost optimization, and critical load support.
- Industrial & Manufacturing: Facilities operate large and variable electrical loads while increasingly integrating renewable energy. Microgrids can help coordinate onsite renewable generation, storage, and grid power to improve renewable utilization, manage peak demand, and strengthen energy resilience for selected critical operations.
- Railways & Metro Infrastructure: Requires dependable energy across stations, depots, auxiliary systems, and other operational facilities. Integrating renewable generation and BESS through intelligent energy management can improve renewable utilization while supporting resilience for selected critical loads.
- Hotels & Commercial Facilities: Manage diverse loads across cooling, lighting, kitchens, and other amenities, often extending beyond solar generation hours. Microgrids can coordinate onsite renewable energy, storage, and grid supply to improve energy utilization, manage demand, and support sustainability objectives.
- Data Centres: Represent one of the most demanding power environments, where continuity, power quality, and energy efficiency are critical. As India's data centre infrastructure expands rapidly, integrating renewable energy, storage, and intelligent energy management can support resilience while helping operators address growing clean-energy requirements.
- EV Charging Hubs: Can create sharp site-demand peaks when multiple high-power chargers operate simultaneously. Integrating renewable generation and BESS within a microgrid can help manage these peaks, optimize available grid capacity, and improve renewable energy utilization.
Each application has different operating priorities, but the underlying principle remains the same: generate where appropriate, store when beneficial, convert efficiently, and manage intelligently.
This is where we believe Delta's experience in power electronics and energy management becomes particularly relevant. Rather than treating renewable generation, storage, and energy management as independent systems, our focus is on bringing them together around the actual operating requirements of the customer.
Building India’s Next Power Layer
India has made significant progress in building renewable generation capacity. The next phase of the energy transition will increasingly be connecting that cleaner generation with storage, electrification, and intelligent energy management.
Microgrids can become an important part of this next phase. For C&I customers, they offer greater control over energy infrastructure, higher renewable utilization, improved demand management, and greater resilience. For the wider energy ecosystem, they can complement the grid by creating flexible and controllable energy resources closer to the point of consumption.
At Delta, our opportunity is therefore not simply to provide an inverter, PCS, BESS, or EMS individually. It is to bring these capabilities together into integrated energy infrastructure designed around how customers generate, store, and consume power.
Because India's next power layer will not be defined only by how much electricity we generate.
It will also be defined by how intelligently we convert, store, manage, and use that energy.