News about peer-to-peer energy trading pilots dominated energy sector coverage in February, when REC showcased its live P2P demo at the India AI Impact Summit. A farmer from Meerut sold surplus solar power directly to a shop owner in Delhi, on a blockchain-enabled platform. UPERC has since approved interstate peer-to-peer trading, while Delhi’s DISCOM is onboarding their first prosumers. Backing all this is a marvel called the India Energy Stack (IES) conceived by the Ministry of Power, Govt. of India.
The India Energy Stack is an interoperable digital framework of open standards and protocols designed to enable secure, low-cost data and service exchange across the entire power sector. The peer-to-peer pilot is (for now) its most visible manifestation. However, there are many consequential applications of the IES for commercial and industrial businesses, which account for over half of India’s electricity consumption. These businesses are navigating a set of cost and power procurement pressures that peer-to-peer alone cannot address.
These include, rising fuel and gas prices in light of the Iran conflict, Europe’s carbon tax (CBAM) and regulations that will soon allow DISCOMs to increase tariffs each year. Domestically, tightened DSM regulations are increasing the cost of schedule mismatches for open access consumers. And BRSR Core deadlines are turning Scope 2 disclosures from being purely procedural to holding companies accountable.
This is where the IES can shine. Its three pillars are:
- Common identities for consumers, sites and assets.
- Consent-based, auditable data exchange.
- Verifiable records for transactions and claims.
A company managing facilities across ten states can consolidate consumption data, prove green procurement hour-by-hour, and share verified records with its bank or auditor through open APIs, without a single PDF changing hands.
We’re proud to publish The India Energy Stack: A Digital Infrastructure Blueprint for Businesses. The publication is Neufin’s attempt to explain what IES means for C&I consumers in concrete, regulatory terms. The paper covers how IES sits alongside NOAR, CCTS, DSM regulations, and Green Open Access Rules, and includes two detailed case studies on an MSME cluster Virtual Power Plant that cuts DSM penalties, and a pharma manufacturer using verifiable green tokens to lower its cost of capital.
