Anand Jain, founder and CEO of Aerem, sits down with Rohit Yadav to explain why rooftop solar took off almost everywhere except India, and what it took to fix the gap. The economics were never the problem. An MSME pays 8 to 12 rupees a unit and a commercial user 12 to 18, while rooftop solar costs around 3 to 3.5. Payback lands between six months and three years, followed by roughly 25 years of effectively free power. The question Anand kept asking was why a market that obvious was not moving. Aerem is a full stack platform for distributed solar, combining financing through its own NBFC, B2B commerce, and solar tech. Around 600 crores disbursed, roughly 1,000 crores of annual commerce sales, close to 5,000 installers on the platform, and about 3,500 plants built totalling 1,500 megawatts. Anand brings 25 years to it: Delhi School of Economics, six years in Mumbai across asset management and bank treasury, an MBA at Yale, Wall Street through the financial crisis, then two years in energy at Barclays Capital. He returned to India in 2009 to build a 10 megawatt project under Gujarat's first solar policy, set up KPMG's solar practice, and deployed about a billion dollars in utility scale before starting Aerem five years ago. Whether you invest in energy, lend against assets, or build in hard physical markets, this one is about why a slam dunk sat untouched for a decade. Chapters: 00:00 What Aerem is, and the three businesses inside it 05:35 From Delhi School of Economics to Wall Street to Indian solar 14:08 Utility scale versus rooftop, and why both will coexist 19:56 Rooftop was 15 percent of installed capacity. Globally it is 60 to 70. 21:49 Net metering, DISCOMs, and what actually slows adoption down 30:31 The three business lines and how they feed each other 36:09 Why he deliberately avoided the subsidised segment 42:24 Inside the lending book: collateral free, asset financed 45:24 The EPC channel as origination engine, and 100 plus quality checkpoints 49:19 Monitoring data, underwriting, and what it unlocks next 54:14 The competitive map: banks, subsidised lenders, private NBFCs 58:53 Fundraising, and why capital follows a scalable business 1:01:37 What went wrong in US residential solar finance 1:05:54 The next 20 years, and 96 percent of the market still untouched🔑 Key insights you will walk away with: ➡️ Why the savings case for Indian MSMEs is 30 to 80 percent off the power bill, and why that still was not enough on its own ➡️ How rooftop went from 15 percent of installed capacity to around 25, and where he thinks it lands ➡️ Why rooftop obviates transmission and distribution infrastructure entirely, even at a 15 to 20 percent cost premium ➡️ The deliberate decision to build where there is no subsidy, and what subsidies do to market quality ➡️ Why installing a plant costs three to four times more elsewhere, and what higher radiation does to the comparison ➡️ Why lending alone is shooting in the dark when execution takes two to three months ➡️ How 100 plus quality checkpoints during execution feed directly back into underwriting ➡️ Why term loans are collateral free with the financed asset as the only security ➡️ What went wrong in US residential solar: savings that were missold, and tenor mismatches ➡️ Why only 3 to 4 percent of the MSME opportunity has been solarised, in a segment he sizes at 500 billion dollarsLinks: Anand Jain: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jainanand/ Aerem: https://www.aerem.co/ Rohit Yadav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohityadav23/ Newsletter: https://yadavrohit.substack.com/
