India's ₹1.86 (about $0.02 USD) trillion transmission plan bets on competitive bidding to avoid the cost trap US utilities face

India's Union Cabinet has approved the Green Energy Corridor Phase-III (GEC-III), a ₹1,86,405 crore (about $22.4 billion USD) scheme to build out intra-state transmission and battery storage capacity by fiscal year 2032-33.^[1][2] The plan targets evacuation of 135 GW of renewable energy, paired with 50 GWh of battery storage to manage intermittency and grid congestion.^[1][3] On its face, it is an infrastructure gamble on the renewable transition. But buried in the implementation design is a structural choice about who builds transmission and how much it costs, one that mirrors a fight playing out across US grid planning.

The split is explicit. Greenfield (new) transmission lines will be awarded through Tariff-Based Competitive Bidding (TBCB), under a Build-Own-Operate-Maintain (BOOM) model in which Transmission Service Providers construct, own, and run the assets.^[2] Brownfield upgrades and network strengthening, by contrast, will run on a Cost-Plus Basis (CPB), executed by State Transmission Utilities.^[2] This is a deliberate hedge between two models. TBCB forces bidders to compete on price and performance; the lowest credible bid wins, and cost is locked in. Cost-plus, conversely, guarantees the operator recovery of all expenses plus a regulated margin, which means the operator has zero incentive to choose cheap alternatives. India's framers appear to have learned what US regulators are still arguing about: if you want new capacity built efficiently, open it to competition. If you let the incumbent utilities choose the path, they will choose the expensive one, because they earn a regulated return on capex.

That learning came at a cost. In the United States, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 1000 (2010) required regional transmission operators to open competitive bidding for new regional transmission projects, and independent studies have shown that competitively bid lines come in 20 to 40 percent cheaper than incumbent cost-plus builds. Yet over the past decade, utility-dominated states have enacted Right-of-First-Refusal (ROFR) statutes that grant incumbent transmission owners the automatic right to build new regional lines in their territory, nullifying the competition requirement. The effect is that cost-plus has crept back in through the legislative door, even as the regulator tried to keep it out. Those ROFR statutes exist precisely because incumbents profit from cost-plus structures and lose from competition. India's TBCB carve-out for new lines is an acknowledgment that competitive discipline produces cheaper transmission.

But the TBCB win is incomplete, and it mirrors a gap in US practice as well. The boundary between brownfield (cost-plus) and greenfield (competitive) work is not carved in stone; what gets classified as a network strengthening versus a new-line build is a choice, and the incumbent has every incentive to classify expensive projects as upgrades so they stay in the cost-plus bucket. The US experience with 'supplemental projects', local-reliability and aging-infrastructure work that escapes competitive bidding, shows the danger: supplemental spending has ballooned across US regions and now rivals or exceeds the regional baseline projects that get scrutiny, running to tens of billions with minimal transparency. India's brownfield category, executed under cost-plus by State Transmission Utilities, risks the same creep.

The battery-storage component adds a second layer of design: 50 GWh of battery storage will be deployed at renewable-generation sites or grid-critical locations to address intermittency and congestion.^[1] This matters because storage, if evaluated honestly against transmission as a congestion solution, is often cheaper and faster to site. In US grid planning, storage-as-transmission is a FERC-recognized alternative that utilities are required to screen before proposing new wires. India's scheme does not explicitly front-load that screening; it assumes transmission and storage as parallel tools rather than ordered options. That is a planning gap.

The real test will be execution. TBCB works only if the bid process is designed to produce real competition, with multiple credible bidders, transparent cost-screening, and no second-guessing of the winner. State Transmission Utilities are the implementing agents, and they have a structural conflict: they are themselves transmission operators, and opening competitive bidding for greenfield work threatens their rate base and cost-plus returns on brownfield. India's framework does not yet show how that conflict will be managed, whether there is an independent transmission monitor, whether TBCB bids are truly public and competitive, or whether the brownfield-versus-greenfield line is governed by independent review or by utility classification. Those details, not yet public, will decide whether TBCB delivers the cost discipline it promises or becomes cost-plus with a tendering ritual attached.