Net metering approvals: what the delay is made of

Across four discoms, the median rooftop net-metering approval took 47 days. Only nine of those were spent with the utility.

PMPriya MenonPolicy & Interconnection

27 August 20261 min read

Net metering approvals: what the delay is made of

47 days, and where they go

Installers describe net metering as a utility bottleneck. The timestamps disagree. We tracked 210 rooftop applications across four discoms from customer signature to meter installation, and the utility held the file for a median of nine working days.

47 days

median signature to meter

9 days

median time actually with the discom

2.4

average resubmissions per application

The resubmission loop

The dominant cost is not review time, it is the round trip. An application comes back for one missing annexure, sits in an installer's inbox for a week, goes back, and re-enters the queue at the bottom. Two and a half of those loops is most of a month.

Reason for returnShare of returns

Sanctioned load document mismatch29%

Single-line diagram missing a signature24%

Module or inverter model not on the approved list21%

Site photo does not show the meter board15%

Everything else11%

We were not waiting on the discom. We were waiting on ourselves to notice they had written back.
Interconnection coordinator, 6 MW residential portfolio

The short version

Utility review is the smallest slice of the timeline in every discom we measured.
Three quarters of returns are document-completeness issues that a pre-submission check catches.
Watching the inbox is worth more than escalating the file.

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Priya Menon

Policy & Interconnection

Priya tracks interconnection and subsidy policy across Indian states and helps installers build packets that clear the first time.

Net metering approvals: what the delay is made of

47 days, and where they go

The resubmission loop

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