Friday, March 9, 2018

Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Can India achieve the solar goal by 2022?' that was published in Newsband


Can India achieve the solar goal by 2022?
Bengaluru carried out an aerial mission to produce a three dimensional map of rooftop solar power potential. Similar mapping exercises have been carried out in several countries over the past few years. A survey helps determine usable rooftops, separating them from green spaces, and analyses the quality of the solar resource.
An initiative to rapidly scale up rooftop solar installations is needed. Rooftop solar power growth has demonstrated an overall positive trend. Major solar projects that connect to the grid often face the challenge of land acquisition and transmission connectivity. This has led to a delay in planned capacity coming on stream during 2017: What this underscores is the importance of exploiting rooftop solar.  
The Centre should come up with incentives, given the enormous investment potential waiting to be tapped and the real estate that can be rented. India, which is a founder-member of the International Solar Alliance launched in Paris during the climate change conference more than two years ago, must strive to be a global leader. Initiatives such as the Bengaluru mapping project can contribute to assessments of both real potential and risk. and can involve financial institutions, including banks.
Kenya within is a leading nation today in roof-top solar. That is democratization of policies and initiatives and technology. Hope we too adopt such practices. While most of our denizens boast of cars there is hardly anyone with large bungalows who would adopt solar and relieve the nation of power dependence to be made available to the need in those small hamlets or where sun cannot reach for 8-12 hours. Arunachal Pradesh has day hours which are the smallest in our country.
Instead of using hybrid motor vehicles and experimenting with mixing ethanol with petrol as fuel for them Indian scientist must go all out and concentrate on replacing fossil fuel operated vehicles to 100% solar powered ones to save not only precious foreign exchange but environment too.
This is really a good initiative to utilize the untapped solar energy by start the roof top power. This kind will definitely reduce the dependency on conventional energy resources. It is most welcomed.
India had been on track to meet its target of 100 Gigawatt (GW) of solar energy capacity by 2022. If you look at the trajectory India is on, [with] regard to solar capacity addition, real volumes have started to come and it’s accelerating too.  In the last 3-4 months, people’s confidence in that trajectory has weakened somewhat because of trade issues, to do with anti-dumping duties and safeguard duties.
Already the goal looks difficult and then they’re looking at imposing import duties on the primary materials of these projects, so of course that’s going to have an impact. The uncertainty around that is a concern for industry. In the pre-GST regime, we had zero tax on solar panels. Now it is 5%. There is a lot of confusion surrounding the GST on project execution. With the advent of anti-dumping and the prospect of safeguard duties, and so many changes, it becomes that much more uncertain.
India was in third place in terms of how much its market has grown over the year. China has created a bottom up approach where 60-70% of the global manufacturing in solar is from China. They have built this huge ecosystem that is fueling the growth. The problem in India is that uncertainty surrounding tariffs coupled with a large target means that the road ahead to 2022 will be a tough one.

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