Solar EPC marketing splits into two distinct funnels. Residential rooftop is subsidy-sensitive and converts on trust, financing clarity and installer credibility. Commercial and industrial converts on payback modelling, input tax credit recovery and EPC credentials. Running one campaign for both wastes a large share of the budget — and in both cases the controlling metric is cost per completed site survey, not cost per lead, because no advertising platform can pre-qualify roof rights, sanctioned load, or distribution transformer capacity.

That last point is the one most EPC operators learn expensively. A lead costing ₹120 that cannot be installed is not a cheap lead. It is a free way to spend your surveyor's week.

What follows assumes you know solar. It focuses on where the policy, tax and compliance realities of this sector should change how you buy and convert demand.

Why one campaign cannot serve both segments

The two buyers share almost nothing.

The residential buyer is a household making its largest discretionary purchase in years, navigating a government subsidy portal, worried about being cheated, and deciding largely on trust and monthly outflow. The scheme rules shape every part of the conversation.

The C&I buyer is a finance function evaluating a capital allocation against payback, internal rate of return, and depreciation benefits. The central residential subsidy is not available to them at all.

Different anxieties, different proof, different sales cycles, different qualification criteria. The general principle behind this split is in performance marketing for considered purchases.

Truth line: Residential solar is a trust sale with a bureaucratic obstacle course. C&I solar is a finance sale with a grid constraint. Nothing about the campaigns should be shared except your brand.

The residential funnel: what the subsidy structure actually dictates

Under PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, approved in March 2024 with an outlay of ₹75,021 crore, Central Financial Assistance is structured non-linearly: ₹30,000 per kW for the first 2 kW, ₹18,000 for the third kW, and an absolute ceiling of ₹78,000 for any system of 3 kW or above.

Three marketing consequences follow directly.

You cannot advertise a percentage discount. The subsidy is calculated against MNRE benchmark costs, not your invoice. An ad promising "40% off your solar system" is factually wrong and creates consumer protection exposure. If you quote ₹2.5 lakh for a 3 kW system, the customer still receives ₹78,000 — not 40 percent of your price.

Oversizing pitches do not survive the arithmetic. The subsidy stops at 3 kW, so the customer funds every marginal kilowatt themselves. Surplus export is settled at the Average Power Purchase Cost, not the retail tariff — in Madhya Pradesh that rate sits near ₹2.14 per unit against retail tariffs several times higher. "Install bigger and earn from the grid" is a mathematically weak claim.

Applications must route through the national portal. MNRE has issued repeated public advisories warning consumers against third-party platforms, unverified aggregators charging registration fees, and subsidy links circulated on WhatsApp. The official route is pmsuryaghar.gov.in.

That last point has a strategic implication worth sitting with: the government is actively warning your customers against the category your lead vendors occupy. Building your own branded demand is not just cheaper over time, it is the only version of this that government messaging supports.

The GST change that reprices every quote

In its 56th meeting on 3 September 2025, the GST Council reduced GST on renewable energy devices from 12 percent to 5 percent, effective 22 September 2025. MNRE's announcement, published via PIB, stated that rooftop solar under PM Surya Ghar becomes cheaper by roughly ₹9,000 to ₹10,500 per 3 kW system.

Because a supply-and-install EPC contract is treated as a composite supply under the 70:30 deeming rule — 70 percent goods, 30 percent services — the blended project rate moved from about 13.8 percent to about 8.9 percent. Treatment varies with how a contract is structured, so confirm your specific position with your chartered accountant rather than applying the blended figure universally.

Two separate marketing arguments come out of this:

For residential buyers, who have no GSTIN, that tax is an unrecoverable cost. The PIB figure is a concrete, officially sourced saving you can state without inventing anything.

For C&I buyers holding a valid GSTIN, the tax is recoverable as input tax credit against output liability. Their real argument is not the gross invoice but compliant invoicing and correct HSN classification — which means price-led C&I advertising targets the wrong decision criterion entirely.

The C&I funnel: payback, waivers, and grid constraints

C&I buyers are excluded from PM Surya Ghar's residential CFA. Their economics rest elsewhere.

ISTS waivers are on a decay schedule. Projects commissioned on or before 30 June 2025 secured a 100 percent waiver on inter-state transmission charges for 25 years. Projects after that fall into a graded structure that steps down over subsequent years. For open-access C&I buyers this is a live deadline, and marketing that demonstrates command of the current waiver position signals competence far more effectively than any capability claim.

Grid capacity kills qualified leads. In Madhya Pradesh, MPERC regulations permit grid-connected systems up to 500 kW under net metering and up to 1 MW under gross metering. Critically, HT and EHT consumers face a constraint that installed capacity cannot exceed a defined proportion of the serving distribution transformer's rated capacity. A commercially perfect lead can be unserviceable because the local transformer is saturated — something no ad platform can detect.

Decision drivers are financial. Payback period, IRR, accelerated depreciation, CAPEX versus PPA structures, and balance sheet treatment. The B2B search behaviour and qualification mechanics are covered in Google Ads for high-consideration B2B.

Why cost per site survey is the only honest metric

A digital lead in solar is a long way from a sellable job. It fails at the survey stage for reasons entirely invisible upstream:

• Insufficient unshadowed roof area
• No legal roof rights — the single largest urban obstacle
• Sanctioned load below the system size discussed
• Structural integrity failures on older buildings
• Distribution transformer saturation for HT consumers
• Electricity connection in a developer's name rather than the applicant's

That last one deserves specific attention, because it quietly destroys urban campaigns. In many apartment buildings the connection remains in the developer's name long after units are sold, and PM Surya Ghar requires the connection to match the applicant. Residents in dense urban pin codes can be structurally ineligible for the subsidy they clicked your ad to claim. If you are running broad geo-targeting across a city, a meaningful share of that budget is reaching people who cannot transact.

An honest gap: we could find no published benchmark for lead-to-survey or survey-to-sale conversion in Indian solar. The attrition is universally acknowledged in the industry and nobody has published the numbers. Your own historical ratio is the only reliable figure available — which makes measuring it the first thing worth doing.

The structural approach to filtering before sales involvement is in building a qualified demand engine, and the offline conversion tracking that makes survey-stage attribution possible is in attribution after cookies.

What you are now legally prohibited from saying

Solar advertising compliance tightened substantially, and most EPC ad copy has not caught up.

The Central Consumer Protection Authority notified its Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Greenwashing or Misleading Environmental Claims in October 2024. ASCI's guidelines on environmental claims took effect earlier that year.

What this means in practice:

• "Zero electricity bills" requires disclosure of fixed DISCOM charges and minimum billing, which continue regardless of generation. Omitting material information is itself treated as deceptive.
• "Free electricity for 25 years" needs substantiation covering degradation, maintenance, and inverter replacement.
• Specific payback claims must be supported by evidence, not illustrative arithmetic.
• Vague green terms — eco-friendly, sustainable, clean — need accurate, accessible qualifiers.

This is not a reason to market timidly. It is a reason to market with numbers you can defend, which in a category full of inflated promises is itself a differentiator. The broader compliance picture is in why your content, ads and sales say three different things.

The Google Ads constraint nobody warns you about

Residential solar converts on financing. The moment your ads mention EMI, zero-cost EMI, or solar loans, you enter Google's financial products and services policy, which requires advertiser verification before such ads can run.

In India this involves a third-party verification step in addition to standard Google advertiser verification. Without it, your highest-converting bottom-of-funnel ads get disapproved. Attempting to keep financing language off the ad while leaving it on the landing page risks review under circumvention policies.

Start verification before you need it. It is a documentation exercise, not a difficult one, and discovering the requirement mid-campaign costs you weeks at exactly the wrong moment.

Geography is not a targeting setting here, it is a pricing variable

Several states add top-ups to the central subsidy, and the combined amount a customer receives varies substantially by state. Grid integration costs vary too — in Madhya Pradesh, bi-directional meter costs differ markedly between major urban DISCOM jurisdictions and outlying districts.

A single national landing page quoting one subsidy figure will be wrong in most states and will create friction at quotation stage in all of them. Segment landing pages by state, with the current applicable figures verified against the official portal rather than against last year's campaign assets.

Should you buy aggregator leads instead?

The honest version of this comparison.

The case for buying: immediate volume, no build period, variable cost. For an EPC with no marketing capability and idle installation crews, it fills the pipeline this month.

The case against: you are buying a contact who submitted interest on a generic subsidy page, has likely been sold to several competitors simultaneously, and arrives with no relationship to your brand. More consequentially, MNRE's advisories specifically warn consumers against unverified third-party subsidy platforms — meaning some aggregator traffic originates from exactly the category the government is cautioning against.

We could find no independent study comparing aggregator lead economics against owned demand generation in Indian solar. Every figure circulating comes from a company selling one or the other. Your own cost per completed site survey, measured across both sources for a quarter, is the only trustworthy comparison available.

How Midgrow works with solar EPC companies

This is the vertical where our proof is strongest and most specific.

We generated 10,890 leads at 11.3x ROI for a solar EPC client, and delivered 585 percent organic traffic growth with first-position rankings for Autosys Solar. Both were built on the structure described above rather than on lead volume targets.

In practice that means:

• Separate campaigns, landing pages and qualification for residential and C&I — never a shared funnel
• Cost per completed site survey as the reported metric, with survey outcomes fed back into the ad platforms so bidding optimises toward installable jobs
• Pre-survey qualification covering roof rights, connection name, sanctioned load and shading before a surveyor is dispatched
• State-segmented landing pages with subsidy figures verified against the national portal
• Ad copy reviewed against CCPA and ASCI requirements before publication, and Google financial services verification completed before financing ads run

Full scope sits on our digital marketing services page and our energy sector page.

Book a 45-minute growth diagnostic. Bring your lead-to-survey and survey-to-sale ratios if you have them — and if you don't, that's the first thing worth fixing. Start the conversation.

Frequently asked questions

How much subsidy does PM Surya Ghar actually provide?
Central Financial Assistance is ₹30,000 per kW for the first 2 kW and ₹18,000 for the third kW, capped absolutely at ₹78,000 for any system of 3 kW or larger. It is calculated against MNRE benchmark costs rather than your invoice value, which is why advertising a percentage discount off your own price is factually incorrect.

What is the current GST rate on a solar EPC contract in India?
Following the GST Council's 56th meeting, renewable energy devices moved from 12 percent to 5 percent effective 22 September 2025. Under the 70:30 composite supply rule for EPC contracts, the blended project rate is approximately 8.9 percent, down from about 13.8 percent. MNRE stated this reduces a 3 kW rooftop system's cost by roughly ₹9,000 to ₹10,500.

Can commercial buildings claim the PM Surya Ghar subsidy?
No. The Central Financial Assistance under PM Surya Ghar applies to residential households and to group housing societies for common area loads within defined limits. Commercial, industrial and government buildings are excluded, and build their case on accelerated depreciation, input tax credit recovery and payback modelling instead.

Why do so many solar leads fail at the site survey stage?
Because no advertising platform can assess physical and regulatory eligibility. Leads fail on insufficient unshadowed roof area, absent roof rights, sanctioned load below the discussed system size, structural limitations, distribution transformer saturation for HT consumers, and electricity connections registered in a developer's name rather than the applicant's.

Can I advertise "zero electricity bills" for solar in India?
Not without substantiation and disclosure. The CCPA's 2024 greenwashing guidelines treat omission of material information as deceptive, so claims of zero bills require disclosure of fixed DISCOM charges and minimum billing that continue regardless of generation. Specific payback claims must be supported by evidence rather than illustrative calculations.

Does advertising solar EMI options require special approval on Google Ads?
Yes. Mentioning EMIs, loans or financing triggers Google's financial products and services policy, which requires advertiser verification before such ads can run — in India including a third-party verification step alongside standard Google advertiser verification. Complete it before launching, since mid-campaign discovery costs weeks.

Is it worth oversizing a residential rooftop system?
Usually not on economics alone. The subsidy is capped at 3 kW, so the customer funds all marginal capacity, and surplus export is settled at the Average Power Purchase Cost rather than the retail tariff — around ₹2.14 per unit in Madhya Pradesh against substantially higher retail rates. The return on unsubsidised marginal capacity is therefore weak.

Should solar EPC companies buy leads from aggregators?
It depends on your cost per completed site survey from each source, which most EPCs have never measured. Worth noting that MNRE has issued repeated advisories warning consumers against unverified third-party subsidy platforms, so some aggregator traffic originates from the category the government is cautioning against. No independent study compares the two models in India.