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Journalism of Courage
Though India has an ambitious plan for solar rooftop (SRT) of 40 gigawatt (GW) capacity by 2022, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on Monday said that “till November 2018 only 1,334 megawatt (MW) of grid-connected solar rooftop systems had been installed.”
“Solar rooftop has failed to make any headway in the current market which is skewed towards large-scale renewable energy,” the CSE report ‘The State of Renewable Energy in India 2019’ has said. “Also, the preference has been for commercial and industrial installations – residential consumers, who hold immense potential, account for less than 20 per cent of the total installed capacity,” the report states.
Further, the report points out that the “dominance” of large-scale rooftop installations by commercial, industrial, institutional and government/PSU segments has meant that “attention to the residential solar rooftop segment has lagged behind”. It cites the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s SRISTI scheme, the draft Sustainable Rooftop Implementation for Solar Transfiguration of India, launched in December 2017 which proposes Rs 23,450 crore of incentives for discoms and consumers.
It, however, calls out the “flaws” of the scheme. For one, “the subsidy itself: it may incentivise discoms to encourage rooftop installations, but it is designed to benefit them only over the shorter term while magnifying their revenue problems over the longer term.”
