Who gets the spare space on India's power grid?

**Akshara** (0:04)
In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about who gets the spare lane on India's power grid. And then we'll talk about India's refrigerant industry running into a hot issue.
Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Wednesday, 5th August. Coming to the first story. So on 7th January 2025, Jindal Stainless wrote a letter to Haryana's state transmission utility. The company runs a stainless steel plant in Hisar. Through a partnership, it had developed wind and solar projects in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh and wanted to wheel 100 megawatt of that power to Hisar round the clock over the interstate transmission grid. And to do that, it needed a No Objection Certificate or NOC from the state. In mid-February, Haryana said no.
So, to understand the refusal, you need to know how a state gets access to the national grid in the first place. So interstate transmission access is allocated through what the regulations call General Network Access or GNA, which is a standing entitlement to draw a fixed number of megawatts from the national grid from anywhere on it. Now Haryana's GNA entitlement is 6913 megawatt. The physical lines running into the state can carry roughly 10,000 megawatt. And that gap between the entitlement and the wire is the interesting part, because Haryana leans on it every summer when state demand climbs towards 16,500 megawatt and the state buys short-term power on the exchanges to cover the peak. Those purchases move over the same spare capacity Jindal was asking for. Now Haryana's power procurement arm framed the problem as a question of who has first claim on that headroom. So if Jindal took 100 megawatt of it on a long-term basis, that was 100 megawatt the state could no longer reach for in June. So Jindal wrote back in April saying it wasn't asking for any additional power. It was already buying about 104 megawatt from the local discom, and every unit it sourced from Gujarat would simply replace a unit it would have otherwise bought from Haryana's discoms. In May, the company went a step further. It said that if the grid came under stress, the Haryana electricity department could disconnect its open access supply, and Jindal would also bear any imbalance charges. But the state still refused. By September, the matter had reached Haryana's Grid Coordination Committee, which proposed a split. The certificate could be issued for 9 months of the year, but not for June, July and August. Jindal could import its own power for three quarters of the calendar and buy from the discom for the rest. But Jindal took the matter to the regulator instead. On 23rd June, 2026, the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission ruled in the company's favour. It held that Haryana could not deny long-term open access just to preserve corridor capacity for temporary users. Keeping spare capacity for short-term summer purchases may make operational sense. But it's not a lawful reason to deny Jindal access to the same transmission corridor. And even then, the victory came with conditions. The commission gave the transmission utility two weeks to put in place the procedures and undertakings needed to operationalise Jindal's curtailment proposal and only then issue the certificate. 18 months after the first letter, a company that had already invested hundreds of crores in generation capacity finally had a way to move its electricity. Now, 30 years ago, if you ran a plant in Haryana, you bought electricity from the Haryana State Electricity Board. There was no second option at any price for any quantity. But the Electricity Act 2003 broke that monopoly with a deceptively simple rule. If a transmission or distribution network has spare capacity on it, the owner must make that spare capacity available to others who want to buy and sell electricity across it. So wires became shared infrastructure rather than the private property of whoever sold the power flowing through them. And this is open access. It was never designed for households. The threshold was set at loads of 1 MW and above, which in practice meant steel plants, cement kilns, textile mills, and auto factories. The Green Energy Open Access Rules 2022 pulled it down to 100 KW for renewable power. And for captive consumers, which are companies that own a stake in a power plant and consume its output themselves, there's no minimum at all. Now coming to the part that trips up almost every conversation about this. So when Jindal's factory in Hisar draws power from a wind farm in Gujarat, no electricity physically travels from that wind farm to the factory. There's no dedicated wire connecting the two.