Commercial Solar in Punjab — A Different Calculation Entirely

A shop owner and a homeowner asking about solar in the same week will get genuinely different answers from us, because the underlying calculation is not the same exercise scaled up.

No free units changes everything

Domestic customers in Punjab get 300 free units a month; commercial connections do not, and are billed under Non-Residential Supply from the very first unit. That sounds like a disadvantage stated on its own, but it removes the single biggest complication in home solar sizing: there is no “is this even worth it under the free-units line” question to answer first. Every solar unit a business uses directly reduces a bill that was never free to begin with.

No subsidy, but a different kind of certainty

PM Surya Ghar is written for homes and housing societies. Commercial and industrial connections pay the full system cost, with no central government subsidy to offset it. What replaces that in the calculation is daytime use: a shop, office, clinic or school that runs most of its load during daylight hours uses its own solar generation directly, which is the most valuable way to use it — more valuable, unit for unit, than exporting surplus to the grid under net metering.

Sizing to a business, not a household

Home systems are commonly sized around the 300-unit free-usage line. A business has no such line to size around; instead, the system is sized to daytime consumption and capped at sanctioned load or contract demand. We ask for twelve months of bills, not one, because business electricity use often swings more by season — a retail shop’s air-conditioning load in summer, a school’s near-zero use through vacation months — than a household’s does.

Industrial connections: a further variation again

Manufacturing units sit on Punjab’s own subsidised industrial energy tariff, a different rate structure again from Non-Residential Supply, typically with fixed-charge waivers for smaller industrial categories. An industrial solar quote starts from that tariff, not from the domestic or commercial one.

The honest version

There is no single “commercial solar payback period” any more than there is one for homes. It depends on your tariff category, how much of your load runs during the day, and the system size your sanctioned load allows. Send us twelve months of bills and we will work through the actual numbers, not a rule of thumb borrowed from residential solar.