Brics 2026: Energy industry seeks easier cross-border investments | Industry News

India’s energy and infrastructure industry expects discussions at the Brics 2026 Summit to lead to meaningful cooperation among member nations, which include both major producers and consumers, across manufacturing, investment, technology and supply chains.

 

“Our wishlist is straightforward. It includes easier cross-border investment, technology partnerships in minerals, storage and biofuels, and development-bank financing for the infrastructure that connects them,” Arman Puri, director at Hindustan Power, told Business Standard.

 

He added that, as host, India has an opportunity to turn the grouping’s resource strength into supply chains and manufacturing capacity that run through the country. Brics matters to energy companies, he said, because it brings the supply and demand sides of the energy transition to the same table.

  

“The member countries between them produce a large share of the world’s oil, gas and critical minerals, and India is one of the fastest-growing consumers of all three. That combination is why the summit is relevant to us,” Puri said.

 

The outcomes the Indian industry wants to see are those that turn cooperation into projects.

 

For critical minerals, that would mean developing a framework for processing technology, long-term supply agreements and financing for midstream capacity in India so that a larger share of value addition takes place domestically.

 

“On grids and storage, the centre of excellence launched by the energy ministers should lead to joint pilots, technical collaboration and greater interoperability across member markets. On biofuels, several members have decades of experience with ethanol and biogas at scale, and that experience is directly useful to India’s own programmes,” Puri said.

 

Other industry leaders said the 18th Brics Summit could prove significant for the global energy landscape, particularly at a time when the West Asia crisis has highlighted vulnerabilities in supply chains and energy security.

 

“With India at the helm and heavyweight energy players like Russia, Iran, and the UAE at the table, the Summit’s agenda, anchored in resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability, signals a clear intent to move from dialogue to significant action,” said Debmalya Sen, president of the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA).

 

He added that the adoption of guiding principles on smart grids and energy storage at recent ministerial meetings, along with the operationalisation of the Brics Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage, marked a step forward in cross-border technology collaboration.

 

“We anticipate the Summit will deliver concrete outcomes in the form of accelerated pilot projects, harmonised standards, and a coordinated push to secure the critical mineral supply chains essential for battery manufacturing and grid modernisation,” he said.

 

Sen also said India’s leadership was significant in steering the grouping towards practical solutions, ranging from the integration of digital public infrastructure and artificial intelligence in the energy sector to strengthening linkages for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and startups that form the backbone of innovation.

 

The proposed Brics Digital Public Infrastructure Repository and knowledge-sharing networks are expected to help ensure that advances in clean energy and storage are scalable across member states, he said.

 

For India’s energy storage ecosystem, the summit represents a strategic inflection point because the decisions taken could shape domestic companies’ ability to future-proof the grid, enhance energy resilience and unlock opportunities in renewable energy and storage technologies.

 

Other industry leaders said the Brics Summit is relevant because the energy transition does not require every country to reinvent the same solutions, but rather faster mechanisms to share what is already working.

 

Large Indian renewable energy companies, for instance, believe the core technology rarely needs to be reinvented across markets. What changes are regulation, grid maturity, local execution conditions and stakeholder alignment.

 

According to Bikesh Ogra, vice-chairman and global chief executive officer of Jakson Green, the energy transition has outgrown any one country’s playbook, while recent disruptions in global supply chains have reinforced the need for countries to strengthen energy security and build resilience into supply chains.

 

He said India was demonstrating what solar and green fuels could look like at scale, with more than 100 GW of renewable capacity already in its project pipeline, while also enabling an ecosystem for the onshoring of manufacturing facilities to support the energy transition.

 

China, meanwhile, has demonstrated what utility-scale storage and large-scale manufacturing can achieve at speed, he said.

 

“Brazil has spent decades mastering biofuels and hydro-backed grids, and the UAE has shown what capital, and execution discipline can do for large-scale energy transition projects. Forums like the Brics Summit 2026 matter because they bring leaders and policymakers together to shorten that learning curve: an approach proven in one market or geography can be adapted, not reinvented, in another. That’s the real dividend of this kind of cooperation – faster, cheaper learning for all economies,” Ogra said.