The first time an Indian institution generated a megawatt of its own solar electricity, it happened on a college rooftop in Chandigarh.
The college was Punjab Engineering College. The company that designed, engineered, installed and commissioned the system was Su-Kam — as Energynext reported at the time, Su-Kam “has bagged a project to commission a 1 MW solar power plant for Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh.” The year was around 2015. And on the day the inverters first synchronised with the grid, India's institutional solar story quietly began.
To appreciate what this project was, you have to first appreciate what it was not. It was not a small captive solar setup of the kind that had dotted Indian institutions in the years before. It was not a token green-energy gesture. And it was not a turnkey job handed to a foreign vendor and rebadged for an Indian press release. It was an end-to-end Indian build, on an Indian campus, by an Indian power-electronics company, at a scale no Indian college had attempted before.
Punjab Engineering College itself is one of the oldest engineering institutions in the country, with a history stretching back to 1921. By 2015, it had a sprawling campus, hundreds of academic and residential buildings, and an electricity bill that grew every year as more lecture halls, laboratories and hostels came online. The institution wanted to do what every Indian institution was beginning to want to do: own a slice of its own electricity. The question was who could actually deliver that ambition at 1 MW.
The Engineering
What it took to put 1 MW on a college
A megawatt of solar on a college rooftop is, in engineering terms, a very different animal from a megawatt of solar on a flat field somewhere outside a city. The available roof area is fragmented across multiple buildings of different ages, different orientations and different structural conditions. The shading patterns from trees, water tanks and adjacent buildings change through the day. The campus' electrical wiring was never originally designed for distributed generation. And the people who use the buildings — students, faculty, hostel residents — cannot be told to wait while the rooftop is being worked on.
Su-Kam's team had to design a system that respected all of those constraints simultaneously. The PV arrays were laid out across the roofs of multiple academic and hostel buildings, sized to the structural and shading reality of each. String inverters and balance-of-system equipment were specified to handle the campus' actual generation profile, not a textbook one. Cabling routes were planned around live academic operations. Switchgear and protection were sized to cleanly synchronise with the existing campus distribution — which is the reason the system is described as grid-connected rather than off-grid: solar generated on the roof feeds into the campus' own electrical network, and any surplus or deficit is settled through the utility grid.
The result, when commissioned, was a system that quietly began to take a serious chunk of the institution's daytime load.
The Numbers
What 1 MW actually does for a campus
Per the figures publicly cited around the project, the PEC installation went on to supply roughly half of the college's total electricity load through solar — a dramatic shift in the campus' generation mix from a few percent to around 50%. In monetary terms, the published estimate of the savings was around Rs 1 crore per year in electricity costs avoided.
Those are the headline numbers. The quieter numbers are arguably more important: the avoided diesel-genset hours during outage days; the avoided peak-tariff consumption during high-cost grid hours; the predictability of an electricity bill that is now partly priced in capex rather than in volatile coal-and-fuel-driven tariffs. Institutions, unlike households, plan in 25-year time horizons; the 1 MW project gave PEC's finance committee something they had never had before — a 25-year visible electricity cost line on a non-trivial portion of their load.
For perspective on the project's place within Chandigarh itself: the PEC plant was, around the time of its commissioning, one of the city's largest solar installations — cited as among the third-largest in the union territory.
The Wider Solar Footprint
How PEC sat inside the larger Su-Kam solar story
The PEC project did not arrive in a vacuum. It sat inside a Su-Kam solar operation that was, by the mid-2010s, one of the broadest in the Indian power-backup industry. The Hindu BusinessLine was already tracking the rooftop demand curve as Su-Kam's solar PCUs and hybrid inverters moved from showrooms into homes and small businesses. BusinessWorld recorded Kunwer Sachdev's central argument from those years — that solar would only scale in India if it was treated as a mass-market consumer product, not as a specialist energy asset.
Around the PEC install, the rest of Su-Kam's solar work was unfolding in parallel. Su-Kam took solar lighting to the India–Pakistan border posts manned by the BSF; mini solar plants were inaugurated in constituencies with Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam doing the honours; the company signed a solar storage alliance with Trojan Battery, partnered with Tata Power Delhi for distributed solar in the capital, and pushed solar into petrol pumps, schools and rural cold-chain depots. And the Sun Fuel feature on the Discovery Channel had begun framing solar to Indian audiences the way Kunwer always framed it — as a fuel, like petrol, except free, infinite, and Indian.
Inside that wider portfolio, PEC was the single most legible artefact: the megawatt anyone could point to and say that's what Su-Kam can do at scale, on Indian soil, on an Indian institution.
The Lesson
Why a college rooftop is a more important story than it sounds
It is easy to mistake a 1 MW college installation for a small story. India today has gigawatts of solar; a single megawatt on a campus reads, in 2026, like a footnote. But the value of a first project is never its size. It is the question it answers and the door it opens.
Before PEC, an Indian institution that wanted serious rooftop solar had to either import a foreign system, hire a turnkey EPC for a one-off, or settle for a token captive setup. After PEC, there was a visible Indian reference — a working megawatt, on a real campus, generating real electricity, saving real money, integrated into the existing distribution network. Every Indian institution that has put rooftop solar on its buildings since has, in some sense, walked through the door PEC opened.
That is the part of the legacy that the headline number undersells. The 1 MW at PEC was not just a generation asset. It was a permission slip. It told every CFO and every chief engineer at every Indian college, hospital, factory and office park that this could be done, here, by a homegrown company, at scale that mattered. The country's institutional solar boom that came after has many parents. PEC is one of the quieter ones.
Editorial Note · Independent Coverage
This article is part of an independent editorial series on invertermanofindia.com. It is written by the site's editorial team, drawing on publicly reported coverage of the PEC–Su-Kam project, on the broader press archive cited above, and on first-person recollections from associates who worked at Su-Kam during this period. It is not authored, ghost-written, edited or approved by Mr. Kunwer Sachdev, by any company he was previously associated with, or by any company he is currently associated with. The views, framing and interpretations in this article are the editors' alone. Specific figures cited (1 MW capacity, ~50% load coverage, Rs 1 crore annual saving, third-largest solar project in Chandigarh at the time) reflect the publicly available record at the time of writing; readers are encouraged to verify against current PEC and Chandigarh administration sources for the latest values.
Disclaimer
Mr. Kunwer Sachdev, the original founder and visionary behind Su-Kam, is no longer associated with Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. He has not been involved in the management, operations, or decision-making of the company for several years. Any products, services, communications, or representations made under the Su-Kam name have no connection to Mr. Kunwer Sachdev. His current efforts are entirely focused on new innovations and ventures under different entities, including his latest initiative, Su-vastika, which is redefining the energy storage and power backup industry.