Rooftop vs. ground-mounted: which fits your case?
The honest answer is that the choice is rarely between two options you're actually weighing against each other — it's usually already decided by what you have available: a roof, or land.
If you own a home or a commercial building and your primary goal is cutting your own electricity bill, rooftop solar under PM Surya Ghar (residential) or a straightforward net-metered commercial system is almost always the right fit. Systems here typically run from 1 kW (a small household) up to 1 MW (a large factory roof), and the entire economic case rests on offsetting your own consumption at your existing tariff.
If you own several acres of land that isn't being productively farmed, or is farmed at low margins, and you're looking for a long-term income stream rather than a bill offset, PM-KUSUM Component-A ground-mounted plants (500 kW to 2 MW) are the better fit — here you're selling power to the DISCOM under a PPA rather than consuming it yourself.
A few practical differentiators worth knowing: rooftop systems have lower absolute cost but are constrained by available roof area and structural load capacity; ground-mounted systems need substation proximity and land title clarity but scale far more efficiently per rupee invested at MW scale; and rooftop systems settle bills monthly through net metering, while ground-mounted systems generate DISCOM-paid revenue against a fixed PPA tariff, which is more predictable but requires more upfront documentation.
For commercial and industrial clients specifically, there's a middle path: a large rooftop or open-yard system (10 kW–1 MW) sized purely to your facility's load, still net-metered, still cutting your own bill, but paired with tax benefits like accelerated depreciation and GST input credit that residential customers don't get.
The fastest way to know which applies to you is a site visit — we look at your roof or land, your latest electricity bill, and your goals (bill reduction vs. income generation), and come back with a sized recommendation within days.