India's Solar Energy Program- All set for Lift Off

The Indian government has unveiled the National Solar Plan and this promises to be the start of an fast and exciting ride into Solar energy for the country. It is blessed with abundant Solar insolation as well as a power starved economy. The National Solar plan touches upon the right levers to galvanize the players and solar markets.

Analysis

India is a "Sunshine" country with most of the parts of the country enjoying more than 300 days a year of sunshine with an energy density between 4 to & Kwh/Sqm/day. This translates into 5000 trillion Kwh. Even if 1% of the insolation falling on India is harnessed, it can meet most of India's power requirement. India is currently a power starved country with peaking demand exceeding its current installed capacity of 146000MW by about 10 to 15%. Even worse, the growth in installed capacity(projected at 7000MW/year) will continue to fall short of the growth in demand for power due to high GDP growth rate of 6 -9% .Thus the gap between demand and conventional sources of power is bound to increase further. India has seen some activity in the Solar PV area with companies like Tata BP Solar, Moser Baer PV, Titan Industries etc setting up solar module & Solar cell(Moser Baer) manufacturing plants. However, most of their production has been export oriented as there were no large scale in-country requirements.The government of India has also been in the wait,watch ,experiment mode with regard to Solar energy and had announced a pretty small, capped(Total 50MW) incentive program for Solar PV generated power. Certain states , like West Bengal, Karnataka, Maharashtra etc have utilized this opportunity and have set up or are in the process of setting up MW scale power plants. The Government of India has recently unveiled the Draft National Solar Plan which lays down the road map for achieving Solar energy generation of 20000MW by 2020 in 3 phases : Phase 1(5GW by 2012-13),Phase 2(6-7 GW by 2017),Phase3(20GW by 2020). The following are the concrete steps that will enable this to happen : 1. Government mandate of Roof Top Solar PV power for all sizable government controlled buildings throughout India. 2.Actively promote commercial scale Solar PV plants. 3.Mandate 5% of all new thermal power plants(Coal,gas,oil) to generate solar energy.This will straight away add about 350MW per year of Solar energy. 4.Make necessary regulatory changes to enable net metering from Solar plants.  5.Government will install a few "Technology Demonstration" Concentrated Solar Power plants in the 50-100 MW capacity range. The following incentives will be available : 1. Feed in Tariff(FIT) will be announced by State electricity regulatory authorities based on guidelines by the National Solar Mission and power purchase agreements for 20 years will be on.