Scaling ground-mounted solar in Tier-2 & Tier-3 industrial clusters: Infrastructure & execution gaps

India’s solar revolution is accelerating, with installed capacity surpassing 132.8 GW by late 2025. Yet the country’s solar growth story remains uneven. While major industrial hubs are witnessing rapid adoption of commercial solar solutions, industrial regions in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities — which account for over half of India’s MSME base — continue to face infrastructure, financing, and implementation bottlenecks. From Kanpur’s leather ecosystem to Coimbatore’s textile parks, these industrial clusters represent a significant untapped opportunity for solar adoption — increasingly through ground-mounted open access projects that free industrial units from the limits of their own rooftops.

The Promise of Tier-2 & Tier-3 Clusters

Tier-2 and Tier-3 industrial clusters form an important part of India’s manufacturing and MSME ecosystem. MSMEs, a core pillar of India’s industrial economy, account for 35.4% of manufacturing output, contribute 45.73% of exports, and generate 30.1% of GDP, highlighting their role in driving regional industrial growth. For many energy-intensive industries operating within these clusters, ground-mounted open access solar presents a compelling opportunity to:

• Reduce electricity costs
• Improve energy resilience
• Support long-term sustainability
• Achieve decarbonization goals

For most units in these clusters, rooftops alone cannot deliver meaningful scale — factory sheds are often structurally weak, shaded, or simply too small relative to consumption. Ground-mounted open access plants solve this by locating generation where land is available and wheeling the power to the factory through the grid. The Green Energy Open Access Rules, 2022 lowered the eligibility threshold from 1 MW to just 100 kW, bringing this model within reach of MSMEs for the first time. The results are visible: India’s cumulative open access solar capacity crossed 27.9 GW by September 2025, with 7.8 GW added during the year — driven overwhelmingly by commercial and industrial consumers.

Depending on plant size, consumption patterns, and state-level policies, solar adoption can significantly optimize operational expenditure while improving long-term energy predictability. However, despite supportive renewable energy policies and increasing market momentum, adoption across many Tier-2 and Tier-3 manufacturing clusters remains slow due to financing constraints, grid readiness, infrastructure gaps, and project execution bottlenecks.

Infrastructure Gaps: The Foundational Roadblocks

At the heart of the challenge is a grid system that was never built with distributed solar in mind. India’s distribution infrastructure in non-metro areas remains underprepared for reliable solar integration — a gap the government itself has acknowledged through the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), launched with a ₹3.03 lakh crore outlay to strengthen and modernize sub-transmission and distribution networks and improve the quality and reliability of power supply.

The regulatory picture compounds this. For rooftop systems, states like Jharkhand and Odisha have historically struggled with slower net metering adoption due to policy delays, low awareness, and DISCOM-level challenges — though Odisha has since amended its net metering rules, as recently as November 2025, to align with updated MNRE guidelines. Open access, the route most relevant for ground-mounted capacity, carries its own friction: wheeling charges, cross-subsidy surcharges, and banking provisions vary widely from state to state, and approval timelines can stretch unpredictably. Navigating this regulatory patchwork is precisely where experienced developers add value.

Financing gaps widen these problems. While institutions like SIDBI now offer loans covering up to 80% of project costs, many MSMEs still struggle to meet creditworthiness requirements because their collateral is already pledged against other loans. Additionally, green financing mechanisms, including green bonds, remain largely out of reach at the cluster level due to aggregation and scale constraints. Subsidy support is limited as well: central financial assistance under rooftop solar programs is directed primarily at the residential segment, leaving commercial and industrial units dependent on state-level incentives — access to which is often slowed by cumbersome application processes. This is a large part of why open access models, in which the developer brings the capital and the consumer simply buys the power, are gaining ground so quickly.

Execution Gaps: From Plan to Power

For many industrial clusters, the challenge is no longer whether solar makes economic sense — it is whether implementation can happen at scale, with consistency and quality. A significant part of the obstacle lies in last-mile delivery, where vendor networks in smaller industrial clusters are thin and local installers frequently lack the EPC capabilities needed for reliable, long-term installations. Inconsistent installation quality remains a documented concern across India’s solar sector, with poor-quality mounting structures, substandard balance-of-system components, and inadequate site assessments among the most commonly reported issues. For ground-mounted projects, the execution bar rises further: land aggregation and title diligence, soil testing and foundation design, power evacuation infrastructure, and grid connectivity approvals all demand engineering and regulatory depth that thin local vendor networks rarely possess.

Simultaneously, India’s solar sector faces a well-documented shortage of trained professionals, with demand for engineers, technicians, and certified installers growing considerably faster than the training infrastructure that supports them. While the government is working to address this — delivering skilling through initiatives such as the PM Surya Ghar scheme, via bodies like the Skill Council for Green Jobs and the National Institute of Solar Energy — the pace of workforce development has not kept up with the scale of deployment being targeted.

Bridging the Gaps: Industry-Specific Strategies

The path forward is not a single solution applied uniformly — it requires approaches calibrated to how different clusters actually operate and the barriers they specifically face. According to the India Industrial Land Bank, India is rapidly modernizing its manufacturing ecosystem by mapping over 4,500 industrial parks across 7.70 lakh hectares. WRI India’s on-ground work across industrial clusters has demonstrated measurable solar potential through aggregation, concluding that combining demand aggregation with developer-financed models is one of the most viable pathways to scaling adoption without requiring upfront capital from individual units. The same logic extends naturally to ground-mounted open access: multiple units in a cluster can jointly contract capacity from a single off-site plant under group captive or third-party sale arrangements, achieving scale economics no individual rooftop can match. NITI Aayog’s MSME decarbonization roadmap reinforces this direction, identifying solar adoption — including through RESCO and open access models — as a key measure within green electricity adoption, one of the three primary levers it outlines for reducing emissions and energy costs across MSME clusters.

This is the model on which Corrit has built its own growth. Our ground-mounted open access portfolio has expanded exponentially in recent years, and the lesson from that journey is consistent: in this segment, trust and transparency are as decisive as tariffs. Clients commit to long-term power arrangements only when the developer demonstrates rigorous site assessment, quality engineering — from foundations and mounting structures to balance-of-system components — transparent generation reporting, and disciplined long-term O&M. Growth in ground-mounted open access is earned project by project, through engineering best practices and relationships in which the client always knows exactly what their plant is delivering.

The opportunity to scale ground-mounted solar adoption across India’s industrial clusters is significant, but unlocking it will require coordinated action by industry, policymakers, financial institutions, and implementation partners. As India advances toward its renewable energy ambitions, the focus must shift from broad intent to practical execution — building models that are commercially viable, operationally scalable, and tailored to the realities of regional manufacturing ecosystems. The next phase of India’s clean energy transition will depend not only on capacity additions, but on how effectively adoption is democratized across the country’s industrial backbone.