The ₹10,000 Crore Clean-Energy Bet by Three Founders Who Already Built One Solar Giant

MUMBAI — May 21, 2026 — Kushagra Nandan has already built one successful solar company. In 2011, he co-founded SunSource Energy, a distributed solar developer that grew into one of India's largest commercial and industrial solar platforms before it was acquired. He could have retired to a comfortable life of angel investing and advisory board seats. Instead, in January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he launched something far more ambitious.

LNK Energy is a new clean-energy platform backed by a planned investment of ₹10,000 crore over five years across three verticals: solar cell and module manufacturing, green fuels including green hydrogen, and renewable power generation as an independent power producer. Nandan is joined by co-founders Varun Karad and Paritish Ladhani, joint managing director of SLMG Beverages, the largest bottler of Coca-Cola in India. The trio are not startup founders in the conventional sense—they are industrialists deploying serious capital to build an integrated clean-energy company from scratch.

The first project is a 6-gigawatt solar cell and module manufacturing plant with an integrated ingot and wafer facility at Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar in Maharashtra. The company has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Maharashtra government. The initial phase will require an investment of ₹1,000 crore—₹700 crore of which has already been approved by domestic lenders, with the remaining ₹300 crore coming from the founders' equity.

The Integrated Platform Thesis

What distinguishes LNK Energy from the hundreds of renewable-energy startups that have launched in India over the past decade is the breadth of its ambition. The company is not building a solar project developer or a hydrogen electrolyzer manufacturer. It is building an integrated platform that spans the entire clean-energy value chain.

The logic is straightforward: solar manufacturing provides the hardware foundation. The cells and modules produced in Maharashtra will supply India's rapidly growing demand for solar power, reducing dependence on Chinese imports that currently dominate the market. Once the manufacturing base is established, LNK Energy will expand into green fuels—specifically green hydrogen and green ammonia—using the solar capacity it has built to power electrolysis. And as an independent power producer, the company will develop, own, and operate renewable energy generation assets, selling power to industrial customers and the grid.

The platform thesis is that each vertical reinforces the others. Manufacturing provides cost-competitive hardware for generation. Generation provides low-cost electricity for hydrogen production. Hydrogen opens a new market—hard-to-abate industrial sectors like steel, cement, and heavy transport—that solar alone cannot serve. "The idea would be to start with a smaller project and then scale," Nandan said of the green hydrogen plans, which are expected to materialize over a three-to-five-year horizon.

Over time, LNK Energy will also manufacture key adjacencies—junction boxes, battery platforms, and energy storage components—supporting the development of a robust domestic clean-energy ecosystem. The vision, as articulated by the founders, is to build "a long-term institution rather than a short-cycle opportunity, with a focus on combining scale, technology depth, and capital discipline to create long-term value."

The German Connection

LNK Energy's manufacturing ambitions rest on a critical partnership with RCT Technologies, a German engineering firm with expertise in setting up solar cell manufacturing lines. The partnership is significant because it addresses one of the most persistent challenges facing Indian solar manufacturing: the technology gap. Indian companies have assembled solar modules for years, but the upstream processes—making the polysilicon, growing the ingots, slicing the wafers, fabricating the cells—have remained concentrated in China.

The Maharashtra plant aims to change that by integrating ingot, wafer, cell, and module production at a single site. The integrated approach reduces logistics costs, improves quality control, and positions LNK Energy to capture a larger share of the value chain. RCT Technologies brings the engineering expertise to design and commission the production lines, transferring knowledge to LNK's Indian engineering team over time.

The German partnership also reflects a broader shift in global clean-energy supply chains. As countries seek to reduce their dependence on Chinese manufacturing, partnerships between Indian companies and European technology providers are becoming more common. The logic is mutual: European firms get access to India's large and growing market, and Indian firms get access to technology that would take years to develop independently.

The Timing Question

The solar manufacturing sector in India is in the midst of a complex transition. The government has launched multiple initiatives to promote domestic production, including the Production Linked Incentive scheme for solar modules and the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers, which restricts government procurement to approved domestic manufacturers. These policies have attracted significant investment, but they have also created uncertainty as companies navigate shifting eligibility criteria and evolving trade restrictions.

Nandan acknowledges the challenges but argues that the policy environment is moving in the right direction. "The government has launched many programs to promote domestic manufacturing in solar, including the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers, which provides hope," he said. LNK Energy eventually plans to participate in the solar PLI scheme, which offers financial incentives for domestic cell and module production.

The broader market context supports the investment. India has set a target of 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, up from roughly 200 gigawatts today. Meeting that target will require a massive expansion of solar manufacturing capacity, much of which will need to be built domestically to avoid the supply-chain vulnerabilities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent geopolitical disruptions. The International Energy Agency has identified India as one of the most promising markets for solar manufacturing diversification outside China, and companies like LNK Energy are positioning themselves to capture that opportunity.

The ₹10,000 crore investment is a bet that the Indian clean-energy market is entering a phase where scale, integration, and technology depth will matter more than speed to market. The founders have built a solar company before. They know the cycles, the regulatory landscape, and the patience required to build manufacturing assets that take years to commission and decades to operate. The Davos launch was the announcement. The Maharashtra plant is the beginning. The green hydrogen ambitions are the horizon. LNK Energy is not a startup. It is an institution in the making.