residential
Residential Rooftop Solar
Residential Rooftop Solar
A rooftop solar system on a home in Madhya Pradesh is three things at once: a piece of electrical equipment bolted to your roof, an application to your distribution company, and a subsidy claim to the Government of India. Most of what goes wrong on a residential project goes wrong in the second and third of those, not the first.
This page sets out what each of them involves — the rules, the numbers and the timelines — so that you can read a quotation and know what you are looking at.
What the subsidy pays, exactly
PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana pays Central Financial Assistance directly into your bank account, in two bands:
| Capacity | CFA rate |
|---|---|
| First 2 kWp | ₹30,000 per kWp |
| The third kWp, or part of it | ₹18,000 per kWp |
| Anything beyond 3 kWp | nothing |
That gives a hard household ceiling of ₹78,000, reached at 3 kWp. A 3 kW system and a 10 kW system receive the same rupee amount. Sizing above 3 kW is often the right decision — it is never a subsidy decision, and anyone presenting it as one is either mistaken or selling.
Only residential connections are eligible, in capex mode — you own the system. The subsidy is computed on rated DC module capacity, so batteries, trackers and hybrid inverters add nothing to it. Each rooftop is eligible once.
Group housing societies and RWAs are treated separately: ₹18,000 per kWp up to 500 kWp for common facilities including EV charging, counting individual households at up to 3 kWp each.
What the equipment has to meet
MNRE publishes a binding technical specification for anything installed under the scheme (Annexure 3 of the scheme guidelines). It is worth knowing because it is the floor no vendor can go below on a subsidised project, and it is checkable on site.
Modules must be domestically manufactured using domestically manufactured cells, qualify to IEC 61215 / IS 14286 and IS/IEC 61730 Parts 1 and 2, carry a rated power tolerance no worse than +3%, a temperature coefficient of power equal to or better than −0.4%/°C, and a fill factor of at least 75%. Output must hold above 90% of rated power through the first ten years and above 80% through the following fifteen, with annual degradation under 0.5%.
Each module carries an RFID tag laminated inside the glass recording the module maker, the cell maker, the month and year of manufacture for cells and modules separately, and the country of origin for each — plus a visible serial number, model number, wattage and Make in India logo inside the lamination. This is the detail that makes a delivered panel auditable against the panel you were quoted, and it is worth photographing at handover.
Inverters must comply with the 2017 Quality Control Order for solar PV inverters, carry integrated MPPT, at least 20% overload capacity, ingress protection of IP-54 indoors or IP-65 outdoors, efficiency above 90% at 10 kW and below, THD under 3%, power factor above 0.9, DC injection within 0.5% of rated output, an operating range of −20 °C to 60 °C, and built-in SIM or dongle data communication. Islanding protection and under/over-voltage disconnection are mandatory, not options.
Mounting structures must be hot-dip galvanised iron, AA6063-T6 aluminium or hot-dip galvanised mild steel, with all bolts and fasteners in SS 304 or hot-dip galvanised, designed for the wind zone of your location with a minimum factor of safety of 1.5 and a design life of 25 years. Minimum ground clearance is 600 mm at the lowest point; an elevated structure needs 8 feet of clearance to remain eligible for subsidy.
What your DISCOM is bound to do, and by when
Net metering in Madhya Pradesh runs under MPERC's RG-39(II) of 2024. The regulation gives a residential applicant several rights that are rarely explained at the point of sale:
- A rooftop system up to 10 kW, where the application is complete in all respects, is deemed accepted without any technical feasibility study at all — and the DISCOM must carry out the matching enhancement of your sanctioned load at the same time, not as a second application.
- For anything larger, technical feasibility for rooftop solar must be decided in 15 days. If the DISCOM does not communicate an outcome in that window, the application is deemed accepted.
- The Letter of Approval must issue within 30 days of acknowledgement.
- After you submit the installation certificate, the DISCOM has 15 days to sign the connection agreement, install the meter and commission the system.
- Where the DISCOM delays without just cause, it is liable to pay you ₹500 for every day of default.
- For systems up to 5 kW, the cost of strengthening the distribution network — including the distribution transformer — sits in the DISCOM's revenue requirement. It is not billed to you.
The ₹1,000 processing fee that RG-39 sets is waived for applicants under PM Surya Ghar, and no meter-testing fee may be charged.
Two constraints work the other way. Your system may not exceed your sanctioned load, and a consumer with pending arrears is not entitled to net metering until those are cleared. Capacity is also allocated distribution-transformer-wise on a first-come-first-served basis, with cumulative rooftop capacity on any transformer capped at 80% of its rating — which is why a neighbour's approval does not guarantee yours, and why the application should not wait.
How the bill actually changes
Madhya Pradesh's domestic tariff is telescopic: the first 50 units are charged at one rate and the last units of a large bill at a much higher one. Solar removes units from the top of that ladder, so the first unit you stop importing is worth substantially more than the last. A household consuming 350 units a month is paying ₹7.05 per unit for its final block and ₹4.71 for its first.
Two things do not change. Fixed charges remain payable — MPERC considered a request to waive them for solar households in the FY 2026-27 tariff order and declined, on the ground that the network is still there and still being used for backup and for net-metering adjustment itself. And where the tariff computes fixed charges from consumption, the regulation directs that they be computed on units imported from the grid. A solar bill is a smaller bill; it is not a zero bill, and a quotation that promises one is describing something else.
Export credits carry forward month to month. The settlement period runs October to September, unadjusted credit is paid out by 15 November at the lowest solar or wind tariff discovered in state bidding the previous year, and the carried-forward balance then resets to zero.
Maintenance is part of the package
The scheme guidelines require a registered vendor to provide five years of comprehensive operation and maintenance free of cost from the date of commissioning, with non-performing or under-performing components repaired or replaced at no charge in that period, and manufacturer warranties passing through to you. Separately, module makers must warrant against manufacturing and material defects for not less than five years.
That is the statutory floor. What sits above it — response times, cleaning cadence, monitoring — is a matter of the contract you sign.
Our scope
Site survey and shading assessment · structural check against the wind zone · electrical single-line design · National Portal registration and subsidy filing · DISCOM net-metering application and follow-through · supply, installation and commissioning · handover with documentation.