India Renewable Energy — 30 More Gigawatts By 2017?

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Reposted from Solar Love:

India has been on the eye of solar enthusiasts and insiders for a long time. It has excellent solar resources, a large population in need of reliable electricity, and the country’s leaders have been talking about solar for awhile. Actually, India and some of its individual states have incorporated some strong solar policies. Unfortunately, the political system and economy there are not at the level of many other countries, including neighbor China, limiting what has been achieved. Nonetheless, the future looks bright.

Image Credit: Balaji.B

Image Credit: Balaji.B

 

Most recently, the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has formulated an energy roadmap aimed at adding 30 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2017, with solar as a significant portion of that. MNRE intends to get India’s solar capacity up from 2 GW to about 10 GW by 2017.

To put all this into a bit of perspective, about 30 GW of solar power were installed worldwide in 2011, and then again in 2012.

Also, to date, India has only 27 GW or so of renewable energy capacity. Nonetheless, it added 12,437 MW of those from 2009 through January 31, 2013.

The government of India noted on March 11 that it is “giving various fiscal and financial incentives, such as capital/interest subsidy, accelerated depreciation, concessional excise and customs duties to promote power generation from new and renewable energy sources. Among the other steps taken to promote power generation from alternative sources of energy include preferential tariff for purchase of power generated from renewable sources, introduction of Renewable Energy Certificates and Renewable Purchase Obligation.”

The roadmap in which the country has expressed its 30 GW target is the country’s 12th. It is for the period 2012–2017.

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Zachary Shahan (2291 Posts)

I'm the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular clean energy website in the world, and Planetsave, a leading green and science news site. I've been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and I've been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, bicycling, and wind energy for the past few years. You can also find my work on Scientific American, Reuters, Think Progress, GE's ecomagination site, several sites in the Important Media network, & many other places. To connect on your favorite social network, go to: zacharyshahan.com


  • Niladri R. Mantena

    India has many, many plans in the pipeline. Unfortunate for India, these
    plans rarely materialize because of the endemic leakage of resources
    and the endless red tape created by the super-duper bureaucrats.
    It will be good information to show the previous plans and the actual
    achievement by way of results. This may be quite revealing.

    • Bob_Wallace

      In many cases solar will sidestep the Indian bureaucracy (formidable as it is).

      There are lots of small towns and villages which rely on expensive diesel for their electricity. Solar can be installed at those levels, away from the main grid, and away from the central powers. With improvements in storage technology India may make a major move away from diesel, grid parity will fairly easy to reach there.

      Then there is the micro solar movement which has been so successful in Bangladesh and is now getting underway in India. Millions of homes which have relied on kerosene and candles for evening light are going to find it cheaper and incredibly better to purchase a small solar system on time payments, paying less than they now do per week for light and after a reasonable number of months owning their system.

      Since people can start with an inexpensive system capable of running a couple of LED lamps and charging a cell phone and then, over time, expand their system to give the household more electricity we may see that many Indians never hook to the grid. They may find they have no need.