Can a factory own a battery energy storage system and lease its capacity to others in India?

Yes. The Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2025 let a consumer develop, own, lease or operate an energy storage system. A battery owned by and co-located with the consumer takes the consumer's legal status. Its owner may sell, lease or rent storage capacity to any consumer, utility, load despatch centre or other person.

What the 2025 amendment changed

• Consumers were added to the list of who may develop, own, lease or operate an energy storage system, alongside generators, licensees, system operators and independent storage providers.
• An energy storage system owned, operated and co-located with a consumer has the same legal status as that consumer.
• If the consumer owns it but it is not co-located, it keeps the owner's legal status, but for scheduling and dispatch it is treated as a separate storage element.
• The owner may sell, lease or rent storage capacity, in whole or part, to any consumer, generation, transmission or distribution utility, load despatch centre or any other person.

Related rules

• Rule 18 of the Electricity Rules, 2005 already treats energy storage as part of the power system and makes independent storage a delicensed activity, registered with the Central Electricity Authority.
• Under the 2026 captive rules, a captive user includes someone who consumes captive power through a storage system that stored it.

What it does not settle

Charges for drawing grid power into a consumer battery, and how stored power is billed, come from your state commission's regulations and tariff order. The national framework of August 2023 suggests electricity duty and cross-subsidy surcharge should apply to final consumption rather than charging power, but that is a recommendation to states.

What Senseible does here

Senseible records grid units that charge a battery as grid electricity and solar that charges it as solar, so a battery does not change the source of the electricity you report.

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Sources: Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2025, G.S.R. 688(E), amending rule 18 of the Electricity Rules, 2005 (energy storage systems), Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2022, G.S.R. 911(E), 29 December 2022, inserting rules 13 to 19 in the Electricity Rules, 2005, Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2026, G.S.R. 186(E), substituting rule 3 of the Electricity Rules, 2005 (captive generating plants), with the Ministry of Power explanatory note, Ministry of Power, National Framework for Promoting Energy Storage Systems, August 2023

Last reviewed 2026-10-23. Rule 18(2), (4) and (5) of the Electricity Rules, 2005 as amended by G.S.R. 688(E) in September 2025 (checked 23 October 2026).