Opinion Express View on India’s energy future: Going solar

In one of his first decisions after becoming Prime Minister, Narendra Modi had set a target of installing 100 GW of solar power in the country by 2022 — 40 per cent of this energy was to be generated from rooftop installations. Though the country’s renewable energy (RE) sector has made appreciable strides in the past 10 years, it missed the 100 GW target by a long margin — the 2022 deadline has been pushed back to 2026. The patchy performance of rooftop installations is a major reason for this failure — the capacity of such systems is currently less than 12 GW. The Pradhan Mantri Suryodaya Yojana (PMSY), a new scheme announced by PM Modi on Monday, can place the decentralised solar power segment on a better footing. It aims to take solar power to one crore households.

Installing solar power is expensive for an individual household. That’s why less than a fifth of the rooftop installations are in the residential sector. At the same time, subsidies on energy generated from conventional power sources make RE an unattractive proposition. Central and state government subsidies for solar installations, in contrast, are offset by deterrents such as cumbersome procedures and quality issues. The government’s failure to frame convincing solutions, especially its flip-flops, seem to have made the problem more intractable. Its 2019 policy required households availing the subsidy to buy solar panels and inverters from companies empaneled by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). The provision was meant to enable the government to monitor the quality of the rooftop systems. But the centralised system restricted consumer choice and three years later, the ministry relaxed this requirement. “The government will publish the lists of solar panel manufacturers and inverter manufacturers whose products meet the expected quality standards,” the MNRE noted. By all accounts, the change has not made a perceptible difference.

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Companies, too, face difficulties in achieving economies of scale when they target individual households. Vendors, therefore, prefer servicing commercial consumers. Gujarat — the state with the most rooftop installations — has tried to address these issues with aggressive awareness campaigns and timely disbursal of subsidies. But with the grid getting a substantial amount of electricity from households, the state’s discoms are confronted with the most difficult problem with RE — intermittent supply. The details of PM Modi’s new scheme are not yet in the public domain. The government would do well to learn the right lessons from the country’s past experiences with solar power.