“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 mentioned on X (Twitter).

Although the 1-crore-households goal is new, the set up of photo voltaic programs on rooftops has been an ongoing authorities programme for greater than a decade. But it’s working far delayed — and the announcement by the Prime Minister is an try to present a recent push to decentralised solar energy within the nation.

Ongoing programme

In one in all his first main choices after turning into Prime Minister in 2014, Modi had set a goal of putting in 100 GW of solar energy within the nation by 2022. This was a five-fold leap from the prevailing goal at the moment. Forty per cent of this capability — 40 GW — was supposed to come back from grid-connected photo voltaic rooftop programs.

While the put in solar energy capability within the nation has risen quickly over the previous decade, the 100 GW goal for 2022 has been missed by an extended margin, and so has the goal for rooftop installations. At the top of final yr, the full photo voltaic put in capability within the nation had reached solely 73.3 GW, of which grid-connected rooftop photo voltaic contributed nearly 11 GW.

Part of the rationale why the nation fell behind the goal was the disruption attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic. But even earlier than that, the expansion trajectory of solar energy was not sufficiently steep. The 40 GW goal for rooftop photo voltaic programs is now speculated to be achieved by 2026.

The Suryodaya Yojana

The particulars of the brand new programme haven’t been launched but, however its focus is barely totally different in that it’s focusing on a sure variety of households as a substitute of put in capability. From this attitude, this newest initiative is just like those which were launched in another nations up to now.

In the late Nineteen Nineties for instance, the United States had unveiled plans to place rooftop photo voltaic programs on 1 million homes, a goal that took about 20 years to realize. Just a few nations in Europe too have had comparable programmes.

Also, the brand new programme introduced by the PM is aimed primarily at particular person households which have remained largely untapped by the continued schemes on rooftop photo voltaic. As a current report by the general public coverage assume tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) confirmed, the residential sector presently accounts for simply 20% of the installations of rooftop photo voltaic capability. The bulk of the present installations have occurred within the industrial and industrial sectors.

Residential buildings, subsequently, provide an enormous, untapped potential. The identical CEEW report confirmed that the almost 25 crore households throughout the nation have the potential to deploy 637 GW of photo voltaic vitality on rooftops, and only a third of this is sufficient to meet India’s total demand for electrical energy from the residential sector.

Not all of that is possible, after all — however there’s nonetheless large scope for progress in India’s rooftop solar energy capability. The CEEW report says about one-fifth of this potential, or about 118 GW, is actually doable.

Importantly, the potential for rooftop photo voltaic is on the market uniformly throughout all states and areas, not like concentrated era of electrical energy by giant photo voltaic parks that require massive company investments, open tracts of land, and highly effective transmission traces.

Energy entry and safety

Whether focusing on put in capability or variety of households, the general aims of such programmes are the identical: making certain vitality safety, effecting a transition to non-fossil sources of vitality, and growing vitality entry.

India has a world dedication to make sure that by 2030 about 50% of its put in capability of electrical energy era comes from non-fossil fuel-based vitality sources. This share has already reached 43%, with renewables — wind, photo voltaic, biogas — contributing about 30% of the full put in capability. But with India’s electrical energy demand anticipated to rise sharply, and different non-fossil gas sources like nuclear or hydro unlikely to indicate a serious surge, renewable vitality, notably photo voltaic, must develop at a really fast tempo to meet the demand.

However, potential alone is just not sufficient, because the expertise with the continued programmes has proven.

The authorities must incentivise the set up of rooftop photo voltaic on particular person households — and utilizing simply monetary mechanisms is not going to suffice. Of course, monetary incentives can be found even for the continued programme, and they’re important.

But many different measures should be taken to create an enabling surroundings for larger penetration. Experts say the learnings from the continued train would assist the federal government in designing the precise mannequin that ensures larger success for the Suryodaya Yojana.

One of the important thing interventions wanted on this route is to allow and empower the distribution firms, particularly ones that don’t put a further monetary burden on them. Most of the electrical energy distribution firms are already bleeding, and bettering their monetary well being is a prerequisite for the success of the brand new programme.