The gap nobody is measuring
Solar energy in India has a commissioning problem that nobody talks about: not because the plants are being commissioned badly, but because the conversation about what happens after commissioning is almost entirely absent.
The industry measures MW commissioned. It measures tariffs discovered in auctions. It measures capacity addition targets achieved or missed. What it does not measure consistently, systematically or honestly is how well the plants commissioned are actually being operated over their 25-year lives.
The difference between a solar plant that is operated well and one that is operated adequately is financial: in generation output, in O&M cost, in asset life and in the credibility of the returns promised to investors and the power promised to offtakers.
What does good solar O&M actually look like in 2026? The answer has changed significantly over the past five years, driven by better monitoring technology, more sophisticated data analytics, maturing O&M contracting structures and the growing pressure from institutional investors and lenders for more rigorous asset management.
What O&M actually covers
Solar O&M is frequently treated as a single activity when it is actually a bundle of distinct disciplines:
- Preventive maintenance: Scheduled inspection, cleaning and servicing on a defined cycle. Module cleaning, inverter servicing, electrical connection checks, tracker calibration and civil and structural inspections.
- Corrective maintenance: Responding to faults, failures and alarms. The speed and effectiveness of corrective maintenance determines how much generation is lost when things go wrong.
- Condition monitoring: Continuous tracking of equipment health parameters to detect degradation before it becomes failure. This is the discipline that separates reactive O&M from proactive O&M.
- Performance management: Tracking plant performance against design expectations, identifying deviations, quantifying losses by category and driving the operational decisions that close the gap between actual and potential generation.
- Compliance and reporting: SLDC scheduling, banking and wheeling compliance, regulatory filings, investor and offtaker reporting. Often underestimated but critical to commercial performance.
The five markers of best-in-class O&M in 2026
Marker 1: Telemetry and data quality as a foundation
Best-in-class O&M starts with a commitment to data quality that many operators have not yet made. The monitoring infrastructure is specified carefully, installed correctly, tested end-to-end before commissioning and actively managed throughout the plant life.
Telemetry infrastructure is frequently value-engineered out of project budgets and rarely audited during operations. The result is monitoring data that is intermittently missing, subtly incorrect or inconsistently timestamped, which corrupts every performance metric and every operational insight built on top of it.
Good operators in 2026 treat data quality as a continuous operational discipline. This foundation is what makes everything else possible.
Marker 2: Performance ratio tracking with deviation analysis
Reporting monthly generation is not performance management. Best-in-class O&M in 2026 tracks Performance Ratio continuously against irradiation-based expectations, identifies deviations in near real-time and attributes those deviations to specific causes: soiling, shading, inverter underperformance, string faults, tracker misalignment or weather events.
An O&M team that knows their PR dropped from 79% to 73% last week and can identify the specific causes is in a fundamentally different operational position from one that knows only that generation was lower than usual.
Marker 3: Proactive maintenance driven by condition data
Preventive maintenance on a fixed schedule is better than reactive maintenance. Condition-based maintenance, where the timing and scope of maintenance interventions is driven by actual equipment health data rather than calendar cycles, is better still.
In 2026, the tools for condition-based maintenance in solar O&M are increasingly accessible. Infrared thermography for hotspot detection, electroluminescence imaging for module defect identification, vibration analysis for tracking components and continuous electrical signature monitoring for inverters and strings are all available and increasingly affordable.
Marker 4: Fleet-level intelligence
For IPPs with multiple plants, best-in-class O&M in 2026 is managed at portfolio level. A centralised monitoring and operations centre has visibility across all assets simultaneously, with normalised performance data that enables direct comparison between plants and identification of systemic issues.
Fleet-level intelligence is one of the most significant differentiators between sophisticated operators and the rest. A systemic O&M issue identified across ten plants simultaneously is fixed once; identified plant by plant, it is discovered and fixed ten times, at ten times the cost and generation loss.
Marker 5: Transparent, automated reporting to investors and offtakers
In 2026, institutional investors and sophisticated lenders expect automated, auditable and real-time performance reporting from their renewable energy assets. Monthly PDF reports compiled manually from dashboard screenshots are no longer sufficient for assets financed through project finance structures with detailed reporting covenants.
Best-in-class operators provide investors and lenders with direct access to performance data through investor portals or APIs, with automated generation of standardised performance reports and exception alerts when performance deviates materially from expectations.
The O&M contracting challenge
The dominant O&M contracting model is fixed-fee contracts with external service providers, structured around inputs rather than outputs. The O&M contractor is paid the same fee whether the plant achieves a PR of 75% or 82%. The financial risk of underperformance sits with the asset owner.
This misalignment of incentives is a structural barrier to O&M quality improvement. A contractor optimising for cost within a fixed fee has limited commercial incentive to invest in condition monitoring capability, advanced analytics or proactive interventions that go beyond the minimum specified in the contract.
The more sophisticated contracting model emerging in 2026 is output-based O&M, where the contractor's fee is linked to plant performance against defined KPIs, with bonus payments for outperformance and penalties for underperformance. This aligns the O&M provider's financial interests with the asset owner's and creates the commercial incentive for genuine performance improvement.
The standard is rising
Solar O&M in India is getting better. The combination of maturing monitoring technology, growing institutional investor scrutiny and the simple passage of time, as plants age and O&M becomes a more visible driver of returns, is raising the bar across the industry.
But the gap between the best and the average remains significant. As India's solar fleet ages, plants commissioned in 2015 and 2016 are now approaching their tenth year of operation with fifteen or more years still to run. The cumulative cost of that gap will become increasingly visible in asset performance data, refinancing outcomes and investor returns.
The standard for good solar O&M in 2026 exists and is being practiced by the best operators in the industry. It is increasingly what sophisticated counterparties will expect as the default. The question for every IPP is whether they are moving toward that standard or rationalising the gap.