AI Can Cut Industrial Power Bills by Double Digits Within Five Years: Says GNA Energy's Sanjeev Kumar

India's energy market is passing through the kind of structural reform that reshaped telecom two decades ago. Open access is widening, market-based power trading is being rolled out, and coal has just been brought under a formal exchange regime through the Coal Exchange Rules, 2026, notified in June. Sitting at the centre of these shifts is GNA Energy, which trades power on the open market, is building the Bharat Coal Exchange, and is layering artificial intelligence over both through platforms such as GNAi and Vidyut AI.  Managing Director Sanjeev Kumar discusses whether India is building one of the world's most ambitious digital energy markets, how AI could cut industrial power costs by double digits, and why he sees coal, power and carbon converging into a single, intelligent marketplace.

1. Is India's power market today where telecom was 20 years ago?

There's a real parallel. Telecom went from a state-monopoly, tariff-driven system to a competitive, technology-led market once regulatory unbundling and private participation kicked in — and the result was scale nobody predicted. Power is at a similar inflection: open access is expanding, market based power trading is being rolled out, distribution licensees are being given more freedom to trade, and coal and minerals are moving toward regulated exchanges. The pipes exist; what's changing is who gets to trade on them and how price discovery happens. If that regulatory unbundling continues, power could see the same explosion in volume and innovation telecom did.

2. Could AI cut industrial power costs by double digits in five years?

For sophisticated buyers, yes — and it's already starting. Most industrial consumers today procure power reactively: fixed contracts, manual scheduling, limited visibility into real-time OTC prices. AI changes that by predicting demand, real demand purchases against price-coupled markets, optimizing banking, and flagging arbitrage across states and time blocks. With AI, smarter PPA structuring and predictive maintenance to cut downtime losses, and double-digit savings for data-driven consumers isn't a stretch — it's a mixed of procurement discipline problem and technology one at this point.

3. Will India need a unified marketplace for coal, power and carbon credits?

Eventually, yes — the regulatory groundwork is already being laid. The MMDR Amendment Act is pushing coal and other minerals toward transparent, exchange-based trading; power already has multiple market segments; carbon credits are the next logical layer as India's compliance carbon market matures. These three aren't separate commodities functionally — coal feeds power generation, and power generation drives emissions accounting. A converged marketplace, or at least deeply interoperable ones, is the natural end state. That's precisely the thesis behind setting up Bharat Coal Exchange (BCX) alongside our power OTC platform.

4. Could energy trading become a trillion-rupee industry?

It's a realistic trajectory, not a stretch target. India's annual electricity spend already runs over Rs. 12 lakh crore rupees, and only a fraction of it currently moves through competitive, traded mechanisms — most is still locked into long-term PPAs. As open access grows, renewable integration increases the need for flexible short/medium-term trading, and coal and carbon markets come online, the addressable base for trading — power, coal, ancillary services, carbon — scales well past what exchanges alone handle today. A trillion rupees in cumulative traded value across the energy complex is plausible within this decade.

5. Is India building the world's most sophisticated digital energy market?

I'd frame it as: India is building one of the most ambitious ones, because of the scale and complexity nobody else has had to solve simultaneously — a huge, diverse grid, a renewable transition happening in real time, and price coupling being introduced across a live market rather than a green-field one. Whether it becomes the most sophisticated depends on execution over the next few years — market coupling design, data infrastructure, and how well AI-driven platforms integrate with regulatory frameworks. The ambition and the regulatory intent are certainly there.

6. Is GNA Energy's future bigger than power trading? What's the long-term vision?

Power trading is the entry point, not the destination. Our long-term vision is to build the data and AI layer for India's entire energy and resources ecosystem — platforms like GNAi and Vidyut AI are designed to bring agentic intelligence to trading, forecasting, and grid decisions, and Bharat Coal Exchange extends that same philosophy to coal. The end goal is an integrated intelligence platform spanning power, coal, and minerals — essentially becoming the data and market infrastructure layer that India's energy transition runs on, not just another trading venue.