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Shortly after returning from the Pran Pratishtha ceremony at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the launch of a new programme to install rooftop solar systems on 1 crore houses.
“On the auspicious occasion of the consecration in Ayodhya, my resolve has been further strengthened that the people of India should have their own solar rooftop system on the roof of their houses,” Modi said, announcing the Pradhan Mantri Suryodaya Yojana.
“This will not only reduce the electricity bills of the poor and middle classes, but will also make India self-reliant in the energy sector,” the Prime Minister said on X (Twitter).
Although the 1-crore-households target is new, the installation of solar systems on rooftops has been an ongoing government programme for more than a decade. But it is running far behind schedule — and the announcement by the Prime Minister is an attempt to give a fresh push to decentralised solar power in the country.
In one of his first major decisions after becoming Prime Minister in 2014, Modi had set a target of installing 100 GW of solar power in the country by 2022. This was a five-fold jump from the existing target at that time. Forty per cent of this capacity — 40 GW — was supposed to come from grid-connected solar rooftop systems.
While the installed solar power capacity in the country has risen rapidly over the past decade, the 100 GW target for 2022 has been missed by a long margin, and so has the target for rooftop installations. At the end of last year, the total solar installed capacity in the country had reached only 73.3 GW, of which grid-connected rooftop solar contributed just about 11 GW.
Part of the reason why the country fell behind the target was the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. But even before that, the growth trajectory of solar power was not sufficiently steep. The 40 GW target for rooftop solar systems is now supposed to be achieved by 2026.
The details of the new programme have not been released yet, but its focus is slightly different in that it is targeting a certain number of households instead of installed capacity. From this perspective, this latest initiative is similar to the ones that have been launched in some other countries in the past.
In the late 1990s for example, the United States had unveiled plans to put rooftop solar systems on 1 million houses, a target that took about 20 years to achieve. A few countries in Europe too have had similar programmes.
Also, the new programme announced by the PM is aimed primarily at individual households that have remained largely untapped by the ongoing schemes on rooftop solar. As a recent report by the public policy think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) showed, the residential sector currently accounts for just 20% of the installations of rooftop solar capacity. The bulk of the current installations have happened in the commercial and industrial sectors.
Residential buildings, therefore, offer a vast, untapped potential. The same CEEW report showed that the nearly 25 crore households across the country have the potential to deploy 637 GW of solar energy on rooftops, and just a third of this is enough to meet India’s entire demand for electricity from the residential sector.
Not all of this is feasible, of course — but there is nonetheless tremendous scope for growth in India’s rooftop solar power capacity. The CEEW report says about one-fifth of this potential, or about 118 GW, is certainly doable.
Importantly, the potential for rooftop solar is available uniformly across all states and regions, unlike concentrated generation of electricity through large solar parks that require big corporate investments, open tracts of land, and powerful transmission lines.
Whether targeting installed capacity or number of households, the overall objectives of such programmes are the same: ensuring energy security, effecting a transition to non-fossil sources of energy, and increasing energy access.
India has an international commitment to ensure that by 2030 about 50% of its installed capacity of electricity generation comes from non-fossil fuel-based energy sources. This share has already reached 43%, with renewables — wind, solar, biogas — contributing about 30% of the total installed capacity. But with India’s electricity demand expected to rise sharply, and other non-fossil fuel sources like nuclear or hydro unlikely to show a major surge, renewable energy, particularly solar, needs to grow at a very rapid pace to fulfill the demand.
However, potential alone is not enough, as the experience with the ongoing programmes has shown.
The government will have to incentivise the installation of rooftop solar on individual households — and using just financial mechanisms will not suffice. Of course, financial incentives are available even for the ongoing programme, and they are essential.
But many other measures need to be taken to create an enabling environment for greater penetration. Experts say the learnings from the ongoing exercise would help the government in designing the right model that ensures greater success for the Suryodaya Yojana.
One of the key interventions needed in this direction is to enable and empower the distribution companies, especially ones that do not put an additional financial burden on them. Most of the electricity distribution companies are already bleeding, and improving their financial health is a prerequisite for the success of the new programme.
