The new rules of paying for electricity

0:00In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First we'll talk about the new rules of paying for electricity, and then we'll talk about a gas the world cannot live without. Welcome back to the daily brief by Zeroda, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshira and today is Wednesday 18th March. Coming to the first story. So over the past few months, we've talked about big shifts happening in India's power sector from the draft National Electricity Policy 2026 to the draft Electricity Amendment Bill aimed at fixing India's financially broken discounts. Those were macro level strategy documents for how India's grid should evolve over the next two decades. So what we're looking at today is a lot more relatable because it directly affects us as consumers. On March 12th, the Minister of Power released something much more immediate, a draft amendment to the electricity rights of consumers rules.

1:01Now these aren't grand policy visions, but operational tweaks to the rules that govern your electricity connection, your bill, and your relationship with the Discom. And buried in them are three provisions that could fundamentally change how large electricity consumers and eventually all of us pay for power. Let's start with a simple question. Should electricity cost the same at 2pm as it does at 8pm? For most of India's history, the answer has been yes. You pay a flat fare per unit regardless of when you consume it. That made sense when most of our power came from coal plants that ran around the clock at roughly the same cost. But India's electricity makes his change dramatically. Solar power now floods the grid during the day and you can see this play out in real time on the Indian energy exchange. So on a typical day, the amount of power offered for sale between 8am and 3pm dwarfs what actually gets bought at peak sellers offer upwards of 35 gigawatts and only a fraction of that is bought.

2:02That gap that surplus electricity is essentially stranded panels generating power with no buyers. Come evening, that surplus vanishes. The market clearing price spikes sharply around sunset as the grid scrambles for power. So flat tariff completely ignores this reality. If the demand of something changes during the day relative to supply, ideally so should its price. And that price would be a useful signal. Cheap prices would push consumers to use power as much as they could when it was abundant, taking some load off the hours when the grid was most stressed. Now to fix that, you can have time of day or TOD tariffs. You charge more during peak hours, peak demand and struggling supply and less during solar hours over supply of solar energy so consumers have a reason to shift their consumption patterns. Now this isn't new. India's consumer rules mandated TOD tariffs back in 2023, at least for commercial and industrial or CNI consumers with demand above 10kW. So here's what this means. Say your normal tariff is just 10 rupees per unit.

3:04Under TOD, the rules say your p-car rate must be at least 20% higher than normal or at least rupees 12. And your solar hour rate must be at least 20% lower or at most 8 rupees. That means in a single day, the gap between the cheapest and most expensive electricity is at least 4 rupees on a 10 rupees base of 40% spread. That's the minimum spread and states can set it wider. Now there's also a safeguard built in. So peak hours can't be longer than solar hours, which are defined as 8 hours during the day. Without this gap, a discount could just declare most of the day as peak, which would defeat the entire purpose by charging premiums through most of the day. So those 2023 rules were supposed to kick in from April 2024 for CNI consumers in April 2025 for everyone else except agricultural consumers. Only that didn't happen. More states drag their feet. And the reason for this was straightforward. TOD billing requires smart meters which can record consumption in time blocks. But India's smart meter rollout has been pay-in fully slow.

4:07Without the meters, the tariff is unenforceable. The new draft acknowledges this slippage. It pushes the deadline to April 20, 27 for CNI consumers and April 20, 28 for all other non-agricultural consumers. This timeline is tied explicitly to the pace of smart meter installation. So for all large consumers, factories, malls, hospitals, data centers, and others, the messages you have about a year to prepare. When DOD hits the economics of how you run your operations will change overnight. Use heavy machinery in daylight hours and you get a 20% discount. Use it during the evening peak and you have to pay a 20% premium. What kind of spread is enough to justify serious investment in automated energy management or in batteries that can store data and power for evening use. And this brings us to our next observation. Now, if you have roofed up solar panels on your factory or office building, you probably use something called net metering. During the day, if your panels generate more electricity than you need, the extra gets

5:08exported to the grid. And at night, when the panels aren't producing anything, you drop power back from the grid. At the end of the building cycle, you pay only for the net difference. What you consumed minus what you exported. Net metering has been the single biggest driver of roofed up solar adoption in India, but it has a hidden subsidy built into it. So think about what happens when a large commercial building exports surplus power at known and withdraws an equivalent amount at 9 pm. From the building owner's perspective, they exported 100 units and drew 100 units back. Their net consumption is zero. But the disk arm is essentially paying for the transaction. The disk arm had to accept that surplus power at noon when the grid was already flushed with solar. And it had to manage the transmission and distribution losses and then balance the grid. And when evening rolled by, it had to procure expensive peak power to supply that same consumer. The building owner paid nothing. And the disk arm effectively acted as a free zero cost battery. That's unfair to say the least.

6:09Now, there's a second subtler distortion. And electricity tariffs are typically slab based, which means higher consumption equals a higher per unit rate. So the idea is that large consumers subsidize smaller ones which in turn cross subsidize this agricultural and low income households. But net metering makes large consumers appear small. A factory that actually consumes 5000 units a month might show a net consumption of just 1000 units after solar offsets landing it in a lower tariff slab. Now, this takes the design of the system. As commercial users avoid higher per unit charges, the cost of maintaining the grid shifts further on to ordinary consumers who can't afford solar panels. So the draft addresses this by allowing state electricity regulatory commissions or SERCs to levy a progressive net metering charge on prosumers. Consumers who both produce and consume power with installations above five kilowatt. Such a change didn't exist until now. 100 household rooftop systems up to 5 kilowatt are fully exempt from this.

7:11But above 5 kilowatt, the charge scales progressively as the scale of setup increases. And the charges are picked to what a battery would cost to do the same job that the grid is currently doing for free. So a small commercial setup with 10 kilowatt of solar would face a modest charge. A large industrial installation with 400 kilowatt would face a meaningful one. The design intent is to make the greatest free battery model progressively more expensive as the system's size grows without killing rooftop solar for households. Now this is gentler than what the NEP-2026 signaled. That policy document wanted to effectively end net metering beyond 5 kilowatt. And the consumer rules take a softer route. They don't ban net metering, they just no longer make it free. But the direction is the same. The third provision is the most forceful. The prosiomers whose renewable electricity installations exceed 500 kilowatt, state commissions now have explicit legal authority to mandate the installation of an energy storage system. This is genuinely new.

8:12The earlier rules had no provision giving regulators the power to force a private consumer to buy a battery alongside their solar plant. They could for sure incentivize storage, but they couldn't require it. The March 2026 draft creates that power through a new sub-rule. And the 500 kilowatt threshold is carefully chosen. It captures large industrial complexes, ID parks, shopping malls, hospital campuses and big warehouses. The segment that's large enough to meaningfully stress the distribution network when thousands of such installations simultaneously dump surplus solar at noon. But it doesn't touch households, small shops or mid-sized commercial setups. Now this isn't mandatory. It just gives a new lever to state commissions. They may mandate storage, not that they must. But the incentive structure makes it almost inevitable that solar heavy states will use this power. Rajasthan, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, where midday grid management is already a serious operational challenge, will likely move first. So how much storage can be mandated?

9:15The draft says appropriate capacity and leaves it to each state commission to define. It could be due to four hours of storage relative to peak solar output, but nothing is specified yet. What makes this provision work, though, is how it fits with the other two. The TOD tariff creates a 40% spread between cheap data and power and expensive evening power, which means a battery that stores solar energy during the day and discharges it at night starts to pay for itself much faster. The net metering charge removes the free alternative of using the greatest storage and this mandate gives powers to regulators to nudge large prosyumers who still don't respond to price signals alone. Each provision reinforces the others. Now there's one more addition worth flagging. So the draft formally defines demand response. The idea that consumers can be paid to reduce their usage when the grid is stressed. That's still in its early days, but it tells you where the government's head is at. Now this is an important area to think about. India solar buildout has outrun its grid. The country added about 15 gigawatt of solar capacity in FY24, 24 gigawatt in FY25 and

10:20a record 36.6 gigawatt in calendar year 2025. Our cumulative capacity crossing 130 gigawatt, but in 2025, India curtailed 2.3 terawatt hour of solar generation. In Rajasthan, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, curtailment rates ran between 10% and 30%. We built the panels, but we're still struggling to use them. Now getting the necessary infrastructure up will take time and capital alone can't close at gap. So we need better battery infrastructure, smarter demand side optimisation for commercial and industrial clusters and more entrepreneurs building the boring grid plumbing work that makes the transition actually work. This is something we've been investing in through rain matter. If you're building in this space, please reach out to us. And giving credit where it's due, the government isn't just writing grand vision documents. It set the broad direction with NEP 2026, but now these consumer rules lay the wiring. COD tariffs, net metering charges, storage mandates, billing safeguards and more.

11:23None of it is headline grabbing, but often the boring stuff matters the most. For all the sources mentioned in this video, don't forget to check out our newsletter. The link is in the description. Coming to the second story, we have talked about what the closure of the straighter foremost means for oil. That was the most obvious angle we found when we first began thinking about this war. But oil isn't the only thing the world depends on that flows out of the Persian Gulf. There's a gas. One most people only associate with birthday balloons, but one that is in fact among the most critical industrial materials on earth. And right now, about a third of the global supply is offline. The gas is helium. Because of this war, Qatar's helium output has become inaccessible. And if this state of things continues for a few weeks, we might find ourselves in a crisis. So helium is the second lightest element in the universe. Out there, in space, it's everywhere.

12:25Stars are essentially helium factories, and a quarter of our own sun's mass is helium. But on earth, it's rare. Helium is so light that Earth's gravity can't hold on to it. Unlike oxygen or nitrogen which cycle endlessly through our atmosphere, soil and living things, once helium escapes to the surface, it drifts up and leaks out into space. Once it's gone from earth, it's gone permanently. This is why you can't manufacture helium. You can't pull it out of the atmosphere the way you can with oxygen or nitrogen. Helium has to be found. And the only reason we have any helium at all is that it forms underground. Some radioactive elements, primarily uranium and thorium, decays slowly inside the Earth's crust over millions of years. As their atoms break apart, they push out helium as a byproduct. And this accumulates in porous rock formations deep underground, often in the same geological traps that hold natural gas. This is why helium and natural gas are often found together. And it's also why extracting helium is not its own standalone industry, but a byproduct

13:29of natural gas processing. However, there are very few places where it accumulates in commercially useful concentrations. According to the US Geological Survey, the United States, Qatar, Russia, and Algeria, together hold roughly 70% of known global reserves. Fewer than 15 producers dominate global output. Helium has a lot of use cases, and one of the biggest is in MRI machines. Now before we get there, let's start with the basics. As current flows through a wire, those electrons meet all sorts of interruptions as they move from atoms to impurities to defects. That friction generates heat and waste energy, and it's why your phone charger gets warm. This resistance is unavoidable at normal temperatures. But at temperatures close to the coldest point physically possible, where atoms nearly stop moving completely, something strange happens to certain metals. Their resistance drops to zero, and electrons flow through them indefinitely without losing any energy. This is called superconductivity.

14:30NMRI machine is built around this principle, and it has a coil of superconducting wire. When current passes through it, it becomes magnetic, so you pass a current through it once, and that current keeps circulating forever, generating a powerful, perfectly stable magnetic field, which is exactly what you need to see the soft tissue inside a human body. The moment that wire warms up even slightly, superconductivity vanishes, the current stops and the magnetic field collapses. This is called a quench. The machine goes offline, and restarting it takes days and a lot of money. So to prevent this, the magnet must be kept in liquid coolant at all times. This is where helium comes in. Helium is the only substance on earth that stays liquid at the extreme temperature superconductivity requires. Everything else freezes at that temperature. A typical MRI machine holds around 1,700 liters of liquid helium and needs periodic top-ups. There is no substitute. To be fair, some newer MRI designs are beginning to enter the market, and these don't remove

15:33the need for helium, but they do reduce it. GE Healthcare and Zeeman's health and years have both developed systems that reduce helium requirements by up to 99%. So far though, there are tiny fraction of the world's installed MRI machines. The overwhelming majority are conventional, and they need lots of helium. The second critical application is less well-known, but increasingly important. Chip manufacturing. Semiconductors currently account for roughly a quarter of the world's helium consumption, and making a modern chip involves etching incredibly fine circuits onto silicon wafers. Features measured in nanometers or billions of a meter. The etching is done using plasma, which is a high energy gas charged electrically that bombards the wafers surface to carve circuit patterns. Only plasma generates intense heat, and because the tolerances in chip manufacturing are so tight, even small variations in temperature across the wafers surface will distort the circuits being etched, yielding defective chips.

16:33Enter helium. During plasma etching, the wafers sits on a cooled metal chunk inside a vacuum chamber. But in a vacuum, two solid surfaces don't make perfect thermal contact. There are microscopic gaps between them, and almost no heat goes from one to another. So helium gas is pumped at low pressure behind the wafers, filling those gaps. So the thermal conductivity of helium is roughly six times higher than argon, making it uniquely effective at drawing heat away uniformly from across the wafers surface. Without it, temperature variation across the wafers doubles, which at modern chip dimensions translates directly to lower yields and defective products. Helium is also used as a carrier and purge gas during other key manufacturing steps. It's chemical inert, which means it reacts to nothing, which is why it doesn't react with any material being deposited on top of the wafer. Now, Qatar is home to only one of two plants globally that produces semiconductor-grade helium. The ultra-poor form required for chip fabrication. In fact, the semiconductor industry association warned, as far back as 2023, that if helium

17:37supplies were disrupted, there would likely be shocks to the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. Heading into 2026, the global helium market was actually in surplus. I had recovered from the last major shortage, which was a bruising period in 2022, cost by fires at a Russian processing plant and an outage at a US federal facility. New capacity had come online, and the industry forecaster Intelligaz projected that supply would exceed demand in 2025 and beyond. Storage facilities in Germany and the US would have to absorb the excess. But then, on March 2nd, Iran attacked Qatar with drones and missiles. Qatar Energy was forced to shut down its Ras-Lafan industrial city complex entirely, and Ras-Lafan is where Qatar processes its natural gas for LNG export. Along with LNG, we also draw out helium as part of that same process. The facility produces up to 17 metric tons of helium per day, roughly one-third of the entire world's supply, production stopped immediately. And two days later, Qatar Energy declared force-major to affected buyers, a commercial and legal

18:41signal that it was incapable of meeting its contracts for reasons outside its control. The company CEO has since said Ras-Lafan will not restart until the conflict ends completely. Now the straighter for more disclosure compounds the problem. Even if Qatar could resume production tomorrow, that helium would have to be shipped through the straight. So this would take specialized cryogenic ISO containers, and a significant portion of those containers are currently either stuck in Qatar but unable to leave or en route there but unable to arrive. Phil Khanblath, one of the world's leading helium consultants, said publicly that this is hard to imagine that helium supply will not be disrupted for a minimum of three months. And however long the production shutdown lasts, the world should expect to add at least two additional months for logistics to normalize. And in his words, the world can't compensate for the loss of a third of its helium supply. Industry observers are already calling this helium shortage 5.0. The fifth significant global helium crisis in 15 years.

19:43Now one most industrial materials fall short that can be partially addressed by ramping a production elsewhere or finding substitutes. Helium offers neither option easily. So other major suppliers, the US, Russia, Algeria are already producing at or near capacity. There is no spare to turn on and new facilities can't come up overnight. New helium extraction infrastructure requires us to find the right geological formations construct specialized processing facilities and set up cryogenic supply chains. That's a multi-year project. Meanwhile, nothing replaces liquid helium for MRI cooling or semiconductor water cooling at the temperatures and conductivities required. The one partial mitigation that works is recycling, capturing and re-liquifying used helium rather than mending it. A well-designed recovery system can recapture up to 90% of helium that would otherwise be lost. But this infrastructure is expensive and most facilities globally, particularly indoor income countries, just don't have it.

20:45Now, India imports essentially all of its helium. There's no domestic production and no strategic reserve. Consumption is driven primarily by healthcare with a growing semiconductor and electronics manufacturing sector adding to demand. India's MRI market is valued at roughly $260 to $280 million. More than 90% of our machines here are conventional, imported systems, all of which run on liquid helium. A supply crunch means higher refill costs. Hospitals might absorb those costs and pass at least some of it onto patients. But the more immediate risk is availability. If global helium allocation titans India with no long-term supply contracts or strategic reserves is near the back of the queue. The semiconductor dimension of this problem is also growing. Most immediately, this will hit us as a shortage of chips. But we need to think hard about our vulnerabilities even beyond this episode. India is trying to develop domestic chip manufacturing capacity and as that happens, our helium

21:46requirements will increase structurally. In that sense, the current disruption is only a preview. For now, the question is how long the conflict in the Middle East lasts. Every additional week that Ras Lafan stays offline makes the eventual supply crunch deeper and the logistics recovery longer. Hospitals that need helium to keep their MRI machines running and chipfabs that need it to keep production lines going are all watching the straight closely. Now coming to the tidbits. Sevi has set up a working group to review rules for mutual fund distributors and reduce overlap with investment advisors. It also plans a common ad code and a digital platform Sevi say too for easier compliance. The move comes amid concerns, falling numbers of registered advisors and rising influence of influencers. Coming to the next tidbit. Reliance industries has signed a $3 billion 15 year deal to supply green ammonia to Samsung C&D starting FY29. The deal is among the largest globally and supports India's push to become a major exporter

22:48of green fuels. It also strengthens reliance, clean energy ambitions. Coming to the final tidbit. Make my trip is exploring a potential listing in India as part of its long term strategy over a decade after listing on NASDAQ. The move could help raise capital locally and strengthen its presence in its core market. The plan is to subject to market conditions and approvals. That's all the news I have for you. Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next one.