Street vendors in India often face a dual pressure: the need to sell their products at profitable prices and the necessity to complete sales before nightfall. This is because as dusk sets in, many buyers begin to feel apprehension about purchasing fruits and vegetables.
When social entrepreneur Akarsh Shamanur from Bangalore noticed this problem, he decided to implement a sustainable change. Thus began his mission to find a way to help these women street vendors.
In 2017, this architect, who holds a master's degree in urban planning and development, founded his enterprise 'Be Po-Lite'. The company specializes in manufacturing solar-powered lighting fixtures. This became his way of supporting vendors and enabling them to work in the evening.
The portable 3W lamps not only provided light during work but also illuminated the women's homes, helping their children study in the dark. Furthermore, the device is multifunctional, as it can be used to charge mobile phones.
According to Akarsh, switching to this technology allows a vendor to save 1200 rupees monthly. He noted that the light works for up to ten hours, and charging time is five to six hours, and that the product was specifically designed with the needs of the vendors in mind.
Akarsh's dream is to spread this idea beyond Bangalore, Gubbali, and Hiriyur, where he has already started working, to cover women street vendors across all of India.
In mid-July 2026, India's power system reached a new milestone: the share of clean energy sources, including hydro and nuclear generation, accounted for 50.02% of total consumption at 221.5 GW, according to the Ministry of Power's MERIT platform. This marked the second consecutive year that clean energy exceeded half the load at a specific point in time, although this period lasted only a few minutes before coal once again dominated.
The overall generation picture shows progress: as of May 31, 2026, India's total installed capacity reached 542.3 GW, with renewable sources accounting for 282.7 GW, significantly outpacing thermal generation at 250.8 GW. The country surpassed the 50% non-fossil installed capacity threshold in 2025, five years ahead of the target set at COP26.
However, peak demand reveals a more complex picture. On May 21, 2026, India recorded a record peak of 270.8 GW, where renewables, including hydropower, supplied only 34% of this volume. According to data from the Institute of Economic and Financial Analysis of Energy, fossil fuels constituted nearly 69% of the share in April. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that demand peaks in India occur in the evening, when cooling system loads remain high, and solar energy, which operates actively at noon, is already absent.
Even the largest renewable energy park, located in Chavda in Kutch, which is expanding to 30 GW by 2029, has faced this issue. The Gautam Adani group installed an energy storage system there in May 2026 with a capacity of 3.37 GWh, marking the largest deployment in one location outside of China. The company plans to increase this volume to 50 GWh over five years.
There are three ways to eliminate the evening deficit: storing daytime surplus energy for nighttime use, generating energy at night using wind, hydro, or nuclear power, or reducing the deficit itself by shifting consumption to daytime hours. Currently, India is primarily focusing on the first solution.
The cumulative operational capacity of battery storage in India reached 8.5 GWh in the first half of 2026, representing an 11-fold increase in one year. The central electricity authority estimates that India will require 411.4 GWh of storage by 2031–2032, and 888 GWh by 2035–2036. Policy has also changed: the viability gap funding scheme approved in September 2023 was scaled up, and the Ministry of Power now requires that solar energy tenders include an adjacent two-hour storage system equal to 10% of the solar capacity.
The third option—demand modification—is the most economical and is in the initial stages of implementation. Shifting consumption to daytime, such as running factory equipment at one PM instead of nine PM, allows for reducing the evening peak without the need to build new capacity. The demand flexibility market allows households or businesses to receive payment for agreeing not to use electricity during peak load hours, similar to how power plants are paid for generated energy. Implementing this requires an aggregator that bundles these commitments into a package understandable to the grid.
In the US, such aggregated capacity ranges from 30 to 60 GW, achieved through regulation. In India, the most ambitious initiative is the Tata Power program in Mumbai, aimed at reducing peak load by 75 MW. However, since most consumers pay a fixed rate regardless of the time of day, they lack the incentive to manage their consumption timing, which hinders market development.
