India Approves $7.3 Billion Ultra-High-Voltage Line to Move Solar and Wind Power East

India’s National Committee on Transmission has approved a new 1,150-kilovolt (kV) power corridor estimated to cost about $7.34 billion (688 billion rupees), a project Reuters reports is India’s highest-voltage transmission line yet, intended to move solar and wind power generated in the country’s west to industrial centers in the east.

The approval, reported this week, covers the first phase of a corridor linking Chhattisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal, which will connect to a 6,000-megawatt (MW) high-voltage transmission system. Most of India’s existing transmission network runs on 765 kV lines, so the new corridor represents a step up in voltage class, allowing more power to move over long distances with lower losses. Construction is expected to take about six years.

Why India needs a bigger pipe for renewable power

The corridor is designed to carry electricity from solar and wind capacity concentrated in western states such as Rajasthan to industrial hubs in Odisha, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, where demand is growing but renewable generation is scarce. India was the world’s third-largest electricity consumer in 2025, and clean sources — hydropower, nuclear, solar and wind combined — supplied 27% of its electricity that year, according to data from the energy think tank Ember cited by Reuters. Solar alone met 9.4% of total demand, with wind and solar together accounting for about 14%; those figures helped India overtake France and Canada in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest generator of clean electricity.

India is also closing in on a government target of 500 GW of non-fossil-fuel generating capacity by 2030; New and Renewable Energy Minister Pralhad Joshi said in August that the country had already passed 300 GW. But growth in generation capacity has outpaced the grid’s ability to move that power to where it is needed. The Daily Energy reported in October that curtailment — power from completed solar and wind projects that goes unused because the grid cannot absorb or transmit it — hit 118.6 GW in September alone, according to JMK Research & Analytics, one of the clearest signs yet that transmission bottlenecks, not generation capacity, are becoming India’s binding constraint on the energy transition.

Grid build-out and storage, together

The new corridor is one piece of a broader push to relieve that bottleneck. India’s government has separately moved to require state-owned distribution utilities to add energy storage capacity, aiming to smooth out the mismatch between when solar and wind generate power and when the grid can use it, rather than relying on transmission investment alone. Taken together, the storage mandate and the new 1,150 kV corridor point to a two-track strategy: batteries to manage short-term swings in renewable output, and higher-voltage lines to move bulk power over the long distances separating India’s best wind and solar resources from its most power-hungry regions.

A six-year build, with more corridors likely to follow

At a six-year construction timeline, the Chhattisgarh-Odisha-West Bengal corridor will not ease today’s curtailment problems; it is a bet on where India’s power demand and renewable generation will be by the early 2030s. With the government committed to pushing non-fossil capacity well past 500 GW this decade, analysts expect the National Committee on Transmission to approve further high-voltage corridors linking India’s solar- and wind-rich west and south to demand centers elsewhere in the country.

Sources

• OilPrice.com, “India Approves $7.3 Billion High-Capacity Power Link to Back Renewables,” November 11, 2026 — corridor specifications, cost, Reuters attribution, Ember and JMK Research data.
• The Daily Energy, “India’s Grid Curtailed 118.6 GW of Solar and Wind Capacity in September” — curtailment context.

Illustrative image. Photo: Frans Berkelaar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source