If the grid is down and my rooftop solar cannot export, does the electricity distribution company pay for the lost units?
No. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) model net metering agreement says the distribution licensee shall not be liable to compensate the consumer if the rooftop system cannot inject surplus power because of a failure of power supply in the grid or network. The consumer also bears the plant and net meter costs.
The clauses that matter
This comes from the model net metering agreement in Annexure 4 of MNRE's guidelines for its residential rooftop solar scheme, Pradhan Mantri Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana. Your state's own agreement may differ, so read the one your distribution company offers you.
- Clause 8.2: the licensee shall not be liable to compensate the eligible consumer if the rooftop renewable energy generating system is unable to inject surplus power generated into the licensee's network on account of failure of power supply in the grid or network.
- Clause 8.1: commercial settlements are in accordance with the Net Metering Regulations of the state.
- Clause 7.2: neither party is liable to the other for loss of profits or revenues, business interruption losses, loss of contract or goodwill, or indirect, consequential, incidental or special damages.
- Clause 7.1: each party indemnifies the other for damages or adverse effects of its own negligence or misconduct during installation, connectivity and operation.
- Clause 9: the consumer bears all costs related to setting up the plant and the cost of the net meters.
What you are left with
- Clause 8.2 says no compensation for surplus you cannot inject. My reading: units the plant could not make while the inverter was off are the same kind of loss, and nothing in these clauses credits them to you.
- You still have a route for billing grievances: clause 10.2 gives recourse to the Consumer Grievance Redressal Forum for a billing complaint the licensee has not redressed.
- Clause 2.4: you furnish data such as voltage, frequency, circuit breaker and isolator position as and when the licensee requires.
How to plan for it
Include a rough outage allowance in your payback sums. If your area has long daytime cuts, the plant earns less than a simple yield figure says. My reading: a plant that cannot run in an outage also protects line workers, which is the reason the specification requires it to switch off, so the loss is a built-in feature of a grid-tied design and not a fault in the plant.
Keep a log of outage dates and times from the factory, so that a low generation month can be explained to a lender or verifier.
How cuts reduce a year's units (example numbers)
- Yield without cuts: 140,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) a year
- Daytime cuts: 40 hours a year, with the plant at an average of 50 kilowatts in those hours
- Units lost: 40 x 50 = 2,000 kWh, which is 2,000 / 140,000 = about 1.4% of the year
All figures are example numbers; my reading is that the lost units are the plant owner's loss, in the same way clause 8.2 treats surplus that cannot be injected.
What Senseible does here
Senseible reads fuel invoices and electricity bills into monthly records, so the grid units you buy each month are on file before and after the plant goes live. It does not review agreements or log outages.
- Will rooftop solar run in a power cut
- Payback of rooftop solar for a factory
- Count rooftop solar with net metering in Scope 2
- Solar generation data missing for a month
Last reviewed 2026-11-06. Re-check clause numbers and figures against the current version of the guidelines before you rely on them. The model net metering agreement is Annexure 4; your state's own agreement may differ, so read the one you are offered.