ALMM List-II is live. Your price list is three months stale

Most of the writing about ALMM List-II has been about compliance. Which list, which project, which date. That question is settled now. The mandate is in force and the argument has moved to a less comfortable place: what it did to your input costs, and who is absorbing that.

If you have quotations still open from April or May, some of them are now priced against a supply situation that no longer exists.

What actually changed on 1 June

From 1 June 2026, eligible projects must use modules built from cells that appear on ALMM List-II. Enlisted List-II cell capacity crossed 30.3 GW at the seventh revision on 30 April 2026, which sounds comfortable until you set it against a market that installed 15.3 GW in the first quarter alone, a 143 percent jump year on year as developers rushed to ground projects before the date.

That rush is the part worth understanding. A large volume of demand was pulled forward into the months before June. What followed was a market buying from a narrower pool of qualifying cells, and trade press has carried forecasts of system prices rising by as much as 20 percent as a result.

Treat that 20 percent as a forecast rather than as your number. The figure that matters is what your own supplier quoted you last week against what they quoted in April.

Which of your jobs sit inside the rule

Not all of them, and the difference is worth real money on a quotation.

Inside: government and government supported projects, net metered installations commissioned on or after 1 June 2026, open access projects commissioned on or after that date, and the other procurement arrangements the order names.

Outside: a purely private, behind the meter commercial job with no net metering, no open access and no government support. That customer can still be served from non List-II stock, legally and cheaply.

So before you reprice a pipeline wholesale, split it. An EPC that raises prices across the board on compliance grounds will lose the private C and I jobs to whoever bothered to read which rule applies where.

What to do with a quotation you sent in May

Three options, in descending order of how much they cost you.

1. Honour it and absorb the difference. Sometimes right, on a job that is nearly signed and whose margin can take it. Decide this deliberately, not by forgetting the quotation is still out there.
2. Reissue with a revised price and an explanation. This works more often than EPCs expect, provided the explanation names the rule, the date and the reason. Customers who have read anything about solar this year have seen the story.
3. Reissue with a validity period and a variation clause, which is what you should have been doing all along.

The third one is the real lesson. A rooftop quotation with no stated validity is an open ended commitment to a price in a market that has moved twice this year, first on GST and now on cells. A fortnight of validity, stated on the document, costs you nothing and ends this problem permanently.

The relief window most EPCs have not used

MNRE declined a blanket extension of the deadline, which got most of the coverage. What got less coverage is that it allowed case by case relief for projects that had completed module installation but were not yet commissioned, or that were at an advanced stage of grounding.

Those requests go through the DCR portal at solardcrportal.nise.res.in with supporting documentation.

If you have a job from April or May with modules already on the roof and a commissioning date that slipped past 1 June, that is precisely the situation the relief was written for. It is worth a submission before you assume the stock is stranded.

What to put in the next purchase order

The failure mode on this rule is not ignorance. It is a verbal assurance from a distributor that a batch is compliant, followed by a commissioning inspection that disagrees.

Put four things in writing on every module order from here on:

• The module model and its ALMM List-I status.
• The cell model and its ALMM List-II status, named separately, because a List-I module does not imply List-II cells.
• Whether the batch is DCR, stated explicitly rather than implied.
• The date, so that if the lists are revised you can show what was true when you bought.

That paragraph takes one minute to add to a purchase order and settles an argument that otherwise costs you a commissioning cycle.

What this does to your pricing process

The broader point is that quotations in this market now have a shelf life, and most EPC quotation templates do not behave as though they do. Two rule changes inside twelve months have moved the price of the same system in opposite directions. The GST cut took it down, the cell mandate has pushed it back up.

An EPC who can requote an open pipeline in an afternoon treats that as weather. An EPC who rebuilds each proposal by hand treats it as a crisis, and usually responds by leaving old prices standing and hoping.

The short version

• ALMM List-II for cells took effect on 1 June 2026. Enlisted cell capacity was 30.3 GW at the April revision, against 15.3 GW installed in Q1 alone.
• Trade press has reported forecasts of system prices rising by up to 20 percent. Use your own supplier quotes instead.
• Split the pipeline before repricing. Purely private behind the meter jobs are outside the rule.
• Quotations need a stated validity period. Two rule changes this year have moved the same system's price in both directions.
• Near complete projects can request case by case relief through the DCR portal.

Sources

• India Brings ALMM List-II For Solar Cells Into Force, TaiyangNews
• Approved List of Models and Manufacturers, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy
• Solar Industry Keeps Fingers Crossed About ALMM-II Mandate for Cells, Mercom India
• India solar record 50 GW 2026: ALMM-II drives prices up 20%, TechObserver, reporting a Wood Mackenzie forecast