Open Access & Group Captive Solar: What EPCs Need to Know Before Bidding C&I Projects

While PM Surya Ghar drives residential volume, a separate and faster-growing story is playing out in commercial and industrial (C&I) solar: open access and group captive models, which let large power consumers procure solar directly from a generator rather than exclusively through their DISCOM. C&I renewable capacity under these models is on track to approach 40 GW by the end of this fiscal year, with tens of gigawatts more in the development pipeline — and EPCs that have only ever built residential rooftop workflows will find the operational demands of a C&I contract are a different business entirely.

What open access and group captive actually mean

Open access lets a commercial or industrial consumer buy power directly from a solar generator (sometimes a third-party developer, sometimes the EPC itself operating as an IPP) instead of buying everything through the local DISCOM at retail tariffs. Group captive is a variant where a group of consumers collectively owns at least 26% of a generating asset and consumes a defined share of its output — a structure the Ministry of Power recently made easier to use by allowing the 51% self-consumption requirement to be met collectively across the group rather than by each entity individually.

Why this is operationally harder than residential rooftop

• Longer sales cycles — a C&I deal typically involves procurement, legal, and finance stakeholders on the customer side, not one homeowner signing off in a single visit.
• Larger, more complex BOMs — ground-mount structures, larger transformers, and often storage integration for round-the-clock industrial load, versus a standard rooftop mounting kit.
• Regulatory paperwork beyond net metering — open access approvals, banking arrangements with the DISCOM, and (for group captive) documentation proving the consumption-share structure, on top of the standard interconnection process.
• Multi-year power purchase agreements — the relationship with the customer does not end at commissioning the way a residential project effectively does; ongoing billing, generation reporting, and contract compliance become permanent operational overhead.

What to have in place before bidding a C&I project

An EPC moving into C&I on top of an existing residential book needs project tracking that can hold a fundamentally different shape of project — longer timelines, bigger budgets, more approval stages — without forcing every project into the same rigid pipeline built for a six-week rooftop install. It also needs procurement and vendor management that can handle a materially larger single-project BOM without the manual reconciliation that a small residential job tolerates.

Solset AI's commercial solutions and industrial solutions pages cover how the platform's project flows, BOM planning, and vendor purchase-order tracking adapt to C&I-scale projects — the same underlying system that handles a residential PM Surya Ghar install, configured for a longer, larger, multi-stakeholder deal instead.

Sources: Saur Energy / CRISIL, pv magazine.