Wheeling & Captive Solar
Generate on land you own. Consume at the factory you run.
Wheeling lets you build a solar plant in one location and use the power at another, transporting the units across the DISCOM network and setting them against consumption at your facility. It’s how a business whose roof is far too small for its load still goes solar at scale.
Right for you if
You run a factory, cold store, hospital, hotel, mall, IT park or large apartment complex on a high-tension connection, your monthly power bill runs into lakhs, and your rooftop can’t come close to covering it.
How it works
A ground-mount or large rooftop plant gets built on land you own or lease. Its output is injected into the grid at that point and drawn at your consumption point, with wheeling and transmission charges applied under the state’s open access framework. The commercial structure is captive, group captive, or a third-party PPA. Each carries different regulatory and tax consequences.
What we handle
- Bill and load-profile analysis to establish whether the case actually works
- Land technical and title due diligence
- Plant design and yield modelling
- Open access and wheeling applications with the DISCOM, SLDC and the state regulator
- EPC delivery, start to commissioning
- Long-term operations and maintenance
A word on the numbers
Wheeling economics turn entirely on current wheeling charges, cross-subsidy surcharge, banking rules and the applicable tariff order. KERC and KSERC revise these periodically. We model your project on the order in force the day we quote, and we show you every assumption rather than burying them.
Accelerated depreciation may materially change the return on a captive project. That’s a question for your CA, and we’ll give them whatever generation and cost detail they need. TODO: confirm AD treatment with your CA before quoting it to clients
Where rooftop beats wheeling
If your roof can cover a meaningful share of your load, rooftop is almost always the better economics, because it avoids wheeling charges and cross-subsidy surcharge entirely. We’ll tell you if that’s your situation, even though the wheeling project would be the larger contract for us.
Common questions
How long do open access approvals take?
It varies by state and by the size of the connection, and it is the longest part of the timeline by a wide margin. Plan in months, not weeks.
We’ll give you a realistic sequence at feasibility stage rather than an optimistic one that slips.
Captive, group captive, or third-party PPA?
Captive means you own the plant and consume the power, which gives the best long-run economics but requires the capital. Group captive brings in an investor while you hold the minimum required equity. A third-party PPA means you buy units at an agreed tariff and put in no capital at all.
Which one wins depends on your balance sheet and your appetite for regulatory exposure. We’ll model all three.
Request a wheeling feasibility study
Send twelve months of HT bills and the location of the land. We’ll come back with an indicative model and tell you plainly whether it’s worth pursuing.