India wants 500 GW of non-fossil power capacity by 2030. That's not a marketing line it's an engineering and data challenge that touches everyone from civil engineers pouring concrete on a Himalayan riverbank to the backend teams building the dashboards that keep a 24/7 waste-to-energy plant online.
If you write software, work in IoT, or just like reading about infrastructure at scale, the renewable sector in India right now is a genuinely interesting place to look. Here's why, and how one developer (Kundan Green Energy) is approaching it across hydro, solar, and waste-to-energy.
Why renewable energy is a systems problem, not just a construction one
Building a solar farm or a run-of-river hydro plant is the visible part. The less visible part is everything that has to work continuously once the concrete is dry and the panels are up:
Forecasting and grid balancing - solar and hydro output both swing with weather and season, so operators need reliable generation forecasting to avoid penalties and to sell power effectively on exchanges like IEX and PXIL.
Energy storage dispatch logic - as battery energy storage systems (BESS) get bolted onto solar and hydro assets, someone has to write the logic that decides when to charge, when to discharge, and how to bid that flexibility into the market.
Waste-to-energy process control - converting municipal solid waste into power involves sensor-heavy combustion and emissions monitoring pipelines that need to hit strict compliance thresholds continuously, not just at inspection time.
None of this is glamorous, but it's exactly the kind of "boring, mission-critical" software that keeps entire cities' worth of power flowing.
A developer in this space: Kundan Green Energy
Kundan Green Energy is one of the companies building across this exact stack. Operating since 2017, it has commissioned 18 projects totaling roughly 197 MW, with a total portfolio above 760 MW spanning:
Hydro power — small and mid-sized run-of-river projects across Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and cross-border sites, with more in the pipeline in Uttarakhand and Karnataka.
Solar power — utility-scale solar assets, including projects commissioned in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, with further capacity planned in Rajasthan.
Waste-to-energy — municipal solid waste conversion, including a commissioned plant in Madhya Pradesh.
Energy storage systems — the newer vertical tying the other three together, aimed at smoothing out intermittent generation.
What's notable from an infrastructure standpoint is the geographic spread. Hydro assets in mountainous, low-connectivity regions and solar assets in flat, high-irradiance states require fundamentally different monitoring and logistics setups — which is a good reminder that "renewable energy company" often means running several very different operational systems in parallel, not one uniform playbook.
