Summary
India's state-run power utilities or DISCOMs are badly in debt despite repeated bail-outs, and are failing in their mandate to deliver reliable, quality power to homes and businesses. However, a new trend is emerging that has the potential to address these challenges. The government, DISCOMs, and major corporations now appear ready to explore ways to unite power utilities with solutions from private decentralized renewable energy (DRE) enterprises to create hybrid DISCOMs that combine the best of public and private, and centralized and decentralized grids, to reduce the debt burden and better serve rural customers.
The country has targets to integrate 500 GW o......