Between May 30, 2026 and June 5, 2026, a series of severe dust storms and thunderstorms swept across several districts in Rajasthan, India. Several transmission towers collapsed near Chandan and Pokhran, disrupting transmission lines. The damage reportedly constrained the evacuation of 500-600 MW of renewable energy generation for several days.
The storm affected renewable generation assets as well. In Barmer, a wind turbine reportedly collapsed, while several solar plants in the Fatehgarh area of Jaisalmer suffered damage, with hundreds of modules uprooted or blown away. Several electricity poles collapsed in Jaisalmer within a span of two-and-a-half hours. One particularly severe storm occurred on June 1, 2026, affecting Khaba Renewable Energy Private Limited’s 250 MW solar project in Barmer. In a subsequent filing before the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), it was reported that approximately 2,891 solar modules and 609 structural components had been damaged. The storm was among several factors cited for delays in commissioning the remaining project capacity. The CERC subsequently granted additional time for infirm power injection and commissioning in September 2026.
These incidents highlight the growing challenge of climate-related risks to the power sector, particularly as renewable energy deployment expands into regions already exposed to high temperatures, strong winds, dust storms and water stress. Moreover, the challenge now extends beyond renewable generation itself. Even where a solar or wind project remains technically capable of producing electricity, the generation can be stranded if pooling substations, transmission towers or evacuation lines fail.
Against this backdrop, this article examines the recent incidents highlighting the physical vulnerabilities of India’s renewable energy infrastructure, the evolving policy response, the measures being adopted by developers and utilities, and the priorities for strengthening resilience across the sector.
Rising disasters
The events in Rajasthan are not isolated. Solar projects have provided some of the clearest examples of such disasters. In March 2026, unseasonal thunderstorms, strong winds and hail affected the Saurashtra and Kutch regions in Gujarat, with solar panels reportedly ripped from high-rise buildings in parts of Rajkot. Fallen electricity poles also contributed to outages in Jetpur and Jamnagar. Similarly, in May 2026, unseasonal rain and strong winds in Kavatheguland in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district blew away solar panels installed on rooftops while also damaging mounting structures. In June 2026, winds damaged ACME Solar’s 300 MW plant at the 2.25 GW Bhadla Solar Park in Phalodi, Rajasthan. Close to 700 solar panels were reportedly uprooted during the storm, and hundreds of electricity poles were affected. In July 2026, heavy rainfall in Patan and Kheda districts in Gujarat inundated ground-mounted solar projects at the Charanka Solar Park. Generation at several sites was reportedly stopped to avoid short circuits, with the flood damaging modules and equipment. More recently, in October 2026, hailstorms across Bareilly district in Uttar Pradesh, and in Haridwar, Uttarakhand damaged solar panels. At UJVN Limited’s 500 kW solar plant near the Pathri power station in Haridwar in particular, an initial assessment found that 142 out of around 2,000 modules had been damaged.
Wind projects also present equipment and resource risks. In November 2025, CRISIL Ratings downgraded the long-term bank facilities of Morjar Windfarm Development Private Limited’s 148.5 MW wind project in Bhuj, Gujarat, attributing the project’s underperformance to exceptionally low wind speeds and blade damage caused by thunderstorms. Furthermore, hydropower faces a different set of physical hazards. In July 2026, heavy rainfall triggered flash floods and landslides in the Chenab Valley, allowing water and rocks to enter areas around the under-construction 540 MW Kwar hydropower project.
The aforementioned incidents are among several such events reported across the country. They show that climate-related risks are not limited to a particular technology or geography. Solar and wind projects face damage from hail, strong winds, flooding and dust, while hydropower projects face risks from extreme rainfall, flash floods, landslides and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). They have also raised questions among the industry regarding mounting-system design, wind-load assumptions, equipment quality, operations and maintenance (O&M) practices and insurance as renewable deployment expands.
The issue becomes particularly important when the geographical distribution of India’s future renewable energy potential is considered. A Council on Energy, Environment and Water 2024 assessment estimated India’s unconstrained renewable energy potential at more than 24,000 GW. However, only 22 per cent of the solar potential and 18 per cent of the onshore wind potential lie in areas combining low climate risk with low land prices. In absolute terms, around 5,618 GW of solar potential falls within the low-climate-risk, low-land-price category.
This means that as renewable energy deployment moves into newer geographies, developers may increasingly have to balance resource availability and land costs against physical climate exposure. These constraints indicate that future renewable energy development will involve growing trade-offs between resource quality, land availability, climate resilience and project economics.
Policy push
Over the past year, the policy focus has increasingly shifted towards embedding climate and disaster resilience into power sector planning and asset design. A major policy shift is especially visible in the Ministry of Power’s (MoP) Draft National Electricity Policy, 2026. Its disaster management provisions explicitly require power utilities to incorporate de-risking measures during planning, construction, upgradation and operations. Materials, technologies and system configurations are to be selected on the basis of location-specific risk assessments. Additionally, the draft proposes that the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) identify disaster-prone regions and periodically revise technical standards and construction norms, while states update disaster-preparedness and business continuity plans. This represents an important shift in emphasis, indicating that climate resilience would no longer be restricted to emergency restoration after a cyclone or flood, but influence how assets are made more climate resilient before construction.
This is complemented by the CEA’s Disaster Management Plan for the Power Sector, 2025, released in December 2025. It focuses on improving grid resilience and building disaster-resistant generation, transmission and distribution networks, and provides for measures such as underground cables in coastal areas, emergency restoration systems to minimise outages, and gas-insulated substations in coastal and seismic-prone areas. Furthermore, under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme, disaster- and cyclone-resilient works worth Rs 30.88 billion have been sanctioned in coastal areas of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. These include high-tension and low-tension underground cables, ring main units, aerial-bunched cables and distribution-transformer augmentation.
Hydropower projects come with their own set of challenges. In the September 2026 issue of Renewable Watch, the article, “Changing Flows: Nepal floods expose vulnerabilities and serve as a caution for India’s hydro projects”, discussed the impact of climate change on hydropower projects and the measures needed to address hydro-related climate risks. The story examined the August 2026 floods in Nepal, which affected 13 hydropower projects involving 783 MW of capacity and disrupted cross-border electricity flows with India. It also highlighted how changing rainfall patterns, glacier retreat and reservoir-level fluctuations are exposing hydropower infrastructure to growing climate risks. It concluded that hydropower planning can no longer rely solely on historical hydrology and stressed the need for catchment-level climate assessments, resilient project design and improved early warning systems (EWSs).
Recent developments show that the focus on monitoring has increased. In July 2026, Sikkim developed an indigenous autonomous glacial-lake profiling and risk-assessment system developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. The state has around 320 glacial lakes, of which 14 were identified as high risk. Furthermore, in September 2026, the central government reviewed GLOF preparedness across Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, focusing on high-risk lakes, early warning, flow paths, evacuation and response.
Ground-level measures
With the policy framework evolving, utilities and renewable energy developers are beginning to incorporate physical climate risks into project planning, asset design and O&M. The approaches vary considerably across technologies. While some companies are undertaking portfolio-wide climate-risk assessments, others are focusing on specific interventions such as predictive maintenance, EWS and geospatial monitoring.
At the transmission level, Power Grid Corporation of India Limited is increasingly using geospatial tools to identify vulnerable infrastructure. It signed an MoU with the Indian Space Research Organisation in 2024 for a spatial decision support system covering transmission towers exposed to floods, river-course changes, landslides, forest fires, lightning and cyclones. Separately, its river-monitoring and vulnerability assessment application uses historical satellite data to track changing river courses and assess risks to nearby transmission towers. Such measures are particularly relevant as renewable evacuation increasingly depends on long-distance transmission corridors passing through varied terrain and climatic conditions.
Similar risk assessments are becoming visible among renewable energy developers. Adani Green Energy Limited undertook a climate risk assessment across its value chain during 2025-26 using multiple climate scenarios ranging from Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) 1.9 to SSP 8.5. It identified coastal, fluvial and pluvial flooding and cyclones among its short-term physical risks, while disposal of solar panel waste is identified as a longer-term transition risk.
A similar shift towards portfolio-level assessment is visible at ReNew. During 2025-26, the company completed IFRS S2-aligned climate-risk assessments across 100 per cent of its operational sites. The assessment identifies extreme heat, water stress, floods, cyclones and landslides as key physical risks across its operational sites. Separately, its nature-related risk assessment identified 27 priority sites based on ecological sensitivity, climate exposure and dependence on ecosystem services. Of these, 13 sites were identified as being exposed to climate risks, including droughts and floods.
Tata Power has taken a technology-wise approach to assessing exposure. During 2025-26, it assessed physical risks across 11 operational thermal, hydro, solar and wind assets. Overall physical risk was classified as low-to-medium for solar, medium for wind and medium-to-high for hydro. Extreme heat was rated high for solar, wind and hydro, while water availability risk was rated medium for solar and high for wind and hydro. Tropical-cyclone risk ranged from low for solar to low-to-medium for wind and medium-to-high for hydro.
Hero Future Energies, in its 2025 climate-risk assessment, covered 48 project locations across India, examining risks including extreme heat, water stress, cyclones and changes in renewable resource availability. The mitigation measures identified include robotic dry-cleaning systems, early-warning technologies and cyclone-resilient infrastructure. Its sustainability assessment also identifies wind drought as a potential source of lower annual energy production and water stress as a risk to solar output through increased soiling when cleaning water is constrained. The approach differs further for hydropower, where the underlying resource and the infrastructure itself are both exposed. JSW Energy conducted a climate risk and adaptation assessment for its Karcham Wangtoo, Baspa and Kutehr hydropower projects in Himachal Pradesh using historical data, climate projections, hydrological modelling, hazard mapping and geospatial analysis. The assessment covers cloudbursts, flash floods, changing snow and glacier patterns, landslides, high sediment flows, water scarcity and GLOFs. Landslides are classified as a high risk across the short, medium and long term, while GLOFs are assessed as a medium-to-high risk over the medium and longer term. Proposed interventions include identification of vulnerable landslide locations, slope-stabilisation works, landslide monitoring and EWSs, alongside continuous monitoring of glacial lakes. For NHPC Limited, the emphasis is increasingly on monitoring and early warning. Its collaboration with the National Remote Sensing Centre covers 26 hydropower stations and projects across eight Himalayan river basins, with satellite monitoring, risk-based ranking of glacial lakes, GLOF modelling and development of threshold-based EWS methodologies, and pilot implementation planned at two hydropower projects.
Beyond company-specific assessments, efforts are under way to develop broader methodologies for quantifying climate risks. In May 2026, Climate Policy Initiative India released a seven-stage Climate Risk Assessment Framework that links district-level climate hazards with asset vulnerability to estimate expected annual loss and energy not served. Such frameworks can provide a methodology for developers, lenders and insurers to assess potential operational and financial impacts and incorporate physical climate risks into project planning and investment decisions. The institutional response is also widening. In July 2026, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure launched a joint study on the resilience of India’s energy infrastructure, covering physical hazards as well as the role of regulation, insurance and finance. The IEA noted that it had tracked nearly 300 weather-related energy supply disruptions globally in 2023, affecting more than 210 million households.
Climate resilience is, hence, gradually moving from risk identification towards asset-level planning and operations. Much of the current activity, however, is still based on company-specific assessments or individual project interventions rather than common, technology-specific resilience benchmarks.
Outlook
As India continues to expand its renewable capacity, ensuring the resilience of both new and existing infrastructure will become increasingly important. Much of the country’s legacy power infrastructure was designed using historical weather patterns, which may no longer reflect both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events today. Upgrading these assets, alongside incorporating climate risks into new projects, will therefore be essential. Climate-risk assessments should, therefore, become a routine.
These challenges are not unique to India, as countries worldwide need to balance climate-proofing their energy infrastructure with clean energy deployment. Hence, it may likely gain greater prominence at COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, in November 2026. The incoming presidency has placed implementation, electrification and resilient cities among the focus areas of its Global Climate Action Agenda. Its climate-resilient cities agenda also calls for stronger infrastructure standards and adaptation as priorities to withstand extreme weather events. This makes resilient electricity infrastructure increasingly inseparable from the wider energy transition debate for India. The transition from a petro-dependent state to an electrostate would mean that failures of power infrastructure will have consequences across transport, industry, communications, cooling and essential services.
While the policy framework is beginning to recognise these vulnerabilities, the real test will lie in how effectively resilience measures translate into infrastructure capable of withstanding increasingly frequent and intense climate-related disasters. The focus must, therefore, shift from restoring damaged assets after floods, cyclones and extreme weather events to anticipating these risks through better design, construction, maintenance and disaster preparedness. Ultimately, the success of the energy transition will depend not only on how much renewable capacity is built, but also on how well that infrastructure is built to withstand a changing climate.
Originally carried in Renewable Watch, a sister concern of REGlobal.