How Luminous is building the intelligence layer for India’s energy transition

India’s energy story is entering a defining new chapter.

The country today has an installed power capacity of 520.51 GW, while the power deficit has fallen dramatically—from 4.2% in FY14 to just 0.03% by December 2025. Renewable energy has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Installed solar capacity has surged from 3 GW in 2014 to 140 GW in January 2026, making India the world’s fourth-largest renewable energy market. On 29 July 2025, renewable sources supplied 51.5% of the country’s electricity demand, a milestone that would have seemed aspirational only a few years ago.

Yet as generation becomes cleaner and increasingly decentralized, a more fundamental challenge is emerging. How do millions of homes, batteries, rooftop solar systems, electric vehicles, smart appliances, and the power grid work together as one intelligent ecosystem?

For Ganesh Moorthi, Senior Vice President – R&D & CTO at Luminous Power Technologies, that question represents the next frontier of the energy transition. “The industry is becoming increasingly software-defined,” he says. “Software is definitely orchestrating energy today. However, trust is still built on the hardware.”

That statement captures a profound shift underway across the energy sector.

For decades, innovation largely meant building better batteries, more efficient inverters, or higher-performing solar modules. Increasingly, however, competitive advantage is moving to the intelligence layer that sits above those products—software capable of predicting, optimizing, coordinating, and autonomously managing energy across an entire ecosystem.

In many ways, the future of energy may be determined less by who manufactures hardware and more by who orchestrates it.

Homes are becoming energy networks

The traditional relationship between consumers and electricity was remarkably simple. Power flowed from the grid into homes. Consumers paid their monthly bill.

That model is disappearing. Today’s homes are rapidly evolving into distributed energy systems. They generate electricity through rooftop solar panels, store it in batteries, consume it through increasingly diverse electrical loads, and, in many cases, export surplus energy back to the grid.

The result is unprecedented complexity. A homeowner must now decide how much solar energy should be consumed immediately, how much should be stored for outages, how much should be exported to the grid, and when high-power appliances—or even an electric vehicle—should operate to maximize efficiency.

Most consumers, understandably, are not energy experts. “It becomes very difficult for a consumer because you are not an energy engineer,” says Moorthi. “The software’s job is to make the consumer’s life easy by autonomously orchestrating energy inside the home.”

That orchestration has become Luminous’ central technology strategy. Rather than viewing batteries, inverters, solar modules, IoT devices, and cloud platforms as independent products, the company increasingly sees them as interconnected components of a single intelligent energy ecosystem.

Intelligence begins inside the hardware

While software often dominates conversations around AI and digital transformation, Moorthi argues that intelligence in energy begins much closer to the physical infrastructure.

The software layer is not merely a dashboard sitting above connected devices. It is deeply embedded within the hardware itself. “We orchestrate it through our intelligence layer, which is sitting everywhere,” he explains. “Software inside the machines and software outside the machines.”

That distinction is important. Inside every inverter and battery lies embedded intelligence responsible for monitoring performance, optimizing charging cycles, protecting battery health, and ensuring reliable power conversion. Outside the hardware, cloud platforms such as ConnectX aggregate operational data from connected systems, allowing homeowners to monitor solar generation, energy savings, and system performance through intuitive dashboards.

But dashboards, Moorthi believes, are only the beginning. “The next evolution lies in moving from visibility to autonomous decision-making. Instead of simply informing customers how much energy they generated, future systems will decide when to charge batteries, when to run heavy electrical loads, when to export electricity, and eventually when to charge electric vehicles—all with minimal human intervention,” he describes.

In other words, software will increasingly become the operating system of the modern home.

Building Indian innovation for global energy challenges

For Moorthi, India’s energy transition presents another opportunity—one that extends far beyond domestic demand.

He believes India has the potential to emerge not merely as a manufacturing hub but as a global centre for intelligent energy innovation.

The country’s diversity itself creates an advantage. India’s electrical infrastructure, climate conditions, grid behaviour, and consumer requirements vary dramatically across regions. These local challenges demand technologies that are adaptive, resilient, and efficient—conditions that often accelerate innovation faster than mature markets.

“I strongly believe India can become a global energy innovation hub,” he says. “The problems are local, but solving them creates technologies that can be relevant globally.”

That philosophy has shaped Luminous’ investment in indigenous intellectual property. Rather than relying exclusively on imported technologies, the company has developed its own Battery Management System (BMS), high-frequency inverter technologies, and intelligent energy platforms tailored to India’s operating conditions. These technologies improve conversion efficiencies, provide greater control over energy storage and grid interaction, and adapt more effectively to dynamic load patterns increasingly common in Indian homes.

For Moorthi, this is where India’s long-term opportunity lies. The country has already demonstrated its manufacturing capability. The next challenge is creating globally competitive intellectual property—technology designed in India, built for Indian realities, and scalable to energy markets around the world.

Building an energy ecosystem, not individual products

If intelligence is becoming the defining differentiator in the energy industry, Moorthi believes companies must fundamentally rethink how they build products.

The future, he argues, will not be won by the manufacturer with the best inverter, the most efficient battery, or the highest-performing solar module in isolation. Competitive advantage will come from connecting these technologies into a seamless ecosystem that continuously learns, optimizes, and adapts.

“When you say an energy player, we need to ask who the real energy player is,” he says. “Energy management is an ecosystem play.” That ecosystem extends far beyond hardware. It encompasses embedded software, cloud platforms, IoT connectivity, cybersecurity, analytics, and increasingly, AI-driven orchestration.

Luminous has spent the past several years digitizing not only its products but also its manufacturing operations, dealer ecosystem, customer service, and enterprise platforms. Cloud-native ERP and CRM systems, AI-ready data platforms, and connected product architectures provide the digital foundation for that vision. Even seemingly simple initiatives—such as QR-code-enabled e-warranty registration—reflect the company’s effort to remove friction while creating richer digital engagement with customers.

Connected products are transforming service delivery as well. Instead of waiting for customers to report failures, ConnectX continuously monitors product health and enables predictive maintenance. AI models analyse operational data to proactively identify potential service requirements, allowing maintenance to shift from reactive troubleshooting to preventive intervention.

For Moorthi, digitization is no longer an IT initiative. It is becoming the operating model for the entire value chain.

Learning globally, building for India

Luminous’ evolution has also been shaped by its integration with Schneider Electric’s global technology ecosystem. Rather than simply importing products, the company has leveraged years of global research, engineering practices, and cybersecurity expertise while building solutions specifically for Indian operating conditions.

Battery Management Systems provide one example. Long before lithium-ion batteries became mainstream in India, Luminous engineers were already learning from Schneider’s global work in energy storage technologies. That knowledge eventually enabled the company to develop its own Battery Management System while continuing to build indigenous intellectual property around battery intelligence and power electronics.

The collaboration extends beyond engineering. Every connected platform is designed using Schneider Electric’s global cybersecurity processes and trust frameworks, ensuring that digital energy systems remain secure as homes become increasingly connected.

For Moorthi, global collaboration and local innovation are complementary rather than competing priorities. “The learning started many years ago,” he says. “Today, we are already working on technologies that are still some distance from commercialization.”

AI is reinventing engineering before it reinvents energy

While much of the AI conversation focuses on customer-facing applications, Moorthi believes its most immediate impact is unfolding inside engineering teams.

Luminous has integrated AI into software development, firmware engineering, debugging, testing, and product validation—compressing development cycles that once took months into days.

One striking example is firmware migration. Earlier, moving from one microcontroller platform to another required two full-time engineers working for three to six months to rewrite firmware. Today, the same transition can be completed in around seven days with a fraction of the engineering effort by combining AI with modern software development practices.

Debugging has seen equally dramatic improvements. Using AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, software debugging effort has been reduced by 70–80%, while coding productivity continues to improve as engineering teams become more proficient with AI-assisted workflows.

The gains extend beyond coding. Luminous rigorously tests products against diverse Indian grid conditions—from Punjab to Kerala—generating enormous volumes of validation reports. Earlier, engineers often spent 20–30 hours analysing a single set of test reports. AI can now generate actionable insights in five to ten minutes, dramatically accelerating product development and decision-making.

Across the organization, Moorthi estimates that AI already delivers a baseline three- to fourfold productivity improvement, while advanced users achieve substantially higher gains in selected engineering workflows. Rather than measuring AI solely through cost savings, Luminous evaluates success through productivity, speed, agility, and engineering excellence.

Perhaps the most interesting consequence is organizational. As AI lowers the barriers between hardware and software development, traditional role boundaries are beginning to blur. “Any hardware engineer can now build firmware with the help of AI,” Moorthi says. “The difference between hardware and software teams is becoming very minimal.”

Toward the autonomous energy home

If today’s connected homes primarily provide visibility into energy consumption, tomorrow’s homes will increasingly make decisions on behalf of homeowners.

Moorthi envisions intelligent energy systems that continuously coordinate rooftop solar generation, battery storage, household loads, EV charging, weather forecasts, electricity tariffs, and grid interactions with minimal human intervention.

The foundation for that future is already taking shape. ConnectX, for example, can already recommend charging an electric vehicle when rooftop solar generation is available—allowing homeowners to maximize self-generated renewable energy instead of drawing power from the grid.

The next step is full orchestration. Rather than merely displaying dashboards, AI will determine the optimal time to charge batteries, power appliances, export electricity, or charge an EV by continuously evaluating weather conditions, solar availability, household demand, and grid dynamics.

Luminous expects the first wave of AI-integrated products to emerge over the next year, with increasingly sophisticated orchestration capabilities evolving through the rest of the decade.

Yet Moorthi repeatedly returns to one principle. Autonomy without trust has no place in critical infrastructure. Unlike consumer applications, AI controlling electrical systems must operate within rigorous regulatory, safety, and cybersecurity frameworks.

“It has to be trusted software, trusted AI,” he says. “It has to be regulated, certified, evaluated, and reliable because we are talking about critical power infrastructure.”

That philosophy neatly brings the story full circle.

As India accelerates toward a renewable, decentralized, and increasingly intelligent energy future, hardware alone will no longer define leadership. Software will orchestrate energy, AI will optimize it, and connected ecosystems will redefine how homes generate, store, and consume power.