The efficiency floor India cannot afford to miss

On 27 June 2026, China issued mandatory national standards that will, from 1 January 2027, bar the manufacture, sale, or import of any crystalline silicon module below a conversion efficiency of 23.2% for TOPCon and HJT technologies, and 23.5% for back-contact modules—a hard floor of roughly 630 watts. Anything below it exits the Chinese market; up to 30% of existing capacity could be affected. This was industrial policy at its most deliberate: a state retiring its own obsolete capacity, from polysilicon to inverters, because the race to the bottom on price had destroyed enough value to compete on. The question India must now answer: where does that retired technology go next?

India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy deserves genuine credit here. The approved list of models and manufacturers (ALMM) framework it built in 2019 answered a real crisis of uncertified imports, catalysing a manufacturing base that has grown from under 3 GW in 2014 to over 200 GW today—a genuine triumph of Indian industrial policy. It has kept moving, proposing in November 2025 to raise the efficiency floor from 20% to 21% in 2027 and 21.5% in 2028, a welcome step. The respectful submission of a manufacturer who will live under this number is that the momentum is worth accelerating: by 2028, China’s floor will already have stood a full year at 23.2–23.5%, the gap between a roughly 580-watt module and a 630-watt-plus one. The same technology that China no longer permits to be sold at all, is what India certifies for its flagship national programmes.

The LCOE case: Efficiency is the cheapest land India will ever buy

The argument for a higher floor is not aesthetic. It is financial, and it compounds over 25 years.

Roughly half the capital cost of a utility-scale plant sits outside the module—land, structures, trackers, cabling, labour. Every point of module efficiency shrinks the physical footprint per megawatt, and with it every balance-of-system line item; moving from 21.5% to 23.2%-class modules cuts area and structure requirements by roughly 7–8% for the same capacity. That matters most where India's real constraint is land, not capital: the 2030 target implies solar additions at a scale where land acquisition, not money, is increasingly the gating factor, and higher-efficiency modules are the only lever that adds megawatts without adding acres. For a country targeting 500 GW of non-fossil capacity, efficiency is land policy by other means.

The gains extend to the grid. Evacuation infrastructure is sized in megawatts and paid for over decades; denser generation per connection point raises the return on every kilometre of transmission India builds—a saving that never appears in a module price comparison but always appears in the consumer's tariff. The newer cell architectures that clear a 23%-plus floor—TOPCon, HJT, back-contact—also carry better temperature coefficients and lower degradation than the PERC-era product a 21.5% floor keeps alive. Higher technology floors are, quite literally, a de-risking instrument for Indian solar finance.

Cheap, low-efficiency modules minimise the invoice. They do not minimise the cost of electricity. That distinction is worth billions of dollars across India's pipeline.

What ALMM should mandate

The framework of ALMM is already strong. Recalibrating it towards the frontier is the natural next step.

Set the utility-scale efficiency floor at 22.4% from January 2027, rising to 23.2% by January 2028, matching China’s standard within a year of it taking effect. This is not a stretch target. Most new Indian manufacturing capacity is already built for TOPCon or newer technology, so this simply asks the industry to meet the standard it has already invested in.

New cell lines, however, take time to mature. Even well-resourced entrants can take close to a year to reach full efficiency and output after commissioning. A floor that applies from day one risks penalising the very investment it is meant to reward. A published ramp-up window of six to nine months, along with grandfathering for projects already committed undersigned LOAs or PPAs, would keep the floor credible without punishing the natural learning curve every new line goes through.

The floor should also vary by technology, the way China’s does. TOPCon, HJT, and back-contact modules perform differently, and a single average number lets the weakest technology hide behind the best. Setting a separate, honest benchmark for each closes that gap. This discipline should not stop at the finished module. It needs to reach back into the supply chain, to solar cells today and to wafers soon, so that outdated technology cannot simply shift one step upstream and re-enter the market unnoticed.

Older technology, like PERC, should be phased out on a clear, published timeline rather than allowed to continue indefinitely. This gives manufacturers certainty to plan their upgrades and ensures that government incentives support new technology instead of prolonging an old one. Finally, the standard must apply everywhere the government is involved, in PSU tenders, PM Surya Ghar, PM-KUSUM, and state programmes alike. A rule that allows exceptions is only as strong as its weakest exception.

The premise, plainly stated

India will install more solar capacity in the next decade than almost any nation on earth. The modules chosen now will define the productivity of Indian land, the utilisation of Indian transmission, the cost of Indian power, and the credibility of Indian manufacturing until mid-century. China has decided that its market will not accept yesterday’s technology. If India’s regulatory floor sits two points below China’s, the flow of yesterday’s technology has only one destination.

ALMM was built to keep substandard products out of India’s energy transition. It succeeded once. The definition of substandard has moved, and the list must move with it—faster, higher, and with the endpoint declared. India should not begin 2027 defending a floor China outlawed the year before. Efficiency mandates are not a burden on India’s solar economics. They are the foundation of them.

(The author is chairman and managing director, Vikram Solar. Views are personal.)