A new report by the CEEW Centre for Energy Finance (CEEW-CEF) reveals India’s grid-scale solar capacity addition during the third quarter (October-December period) of FY 2020-21 stood at 1125 MW. This is more than double the 529 MW grid-scale capacity added in the previous quarter (July-September).
Rooftop solar addition during the quarter was 289 MW.
Overall, the nation added 1414 MW of solar from utility-scale and rooftop projects combined, compared to 928 MW installed in the previous quarter (July-September).
Solar continued to dominate, accounting for 73% of the 1.9 GW RE capacity (grid-scale solar, rooftop solar, wind and biomass/other RE sources) added in Q3 FY21.
Arunabha Ghosh, chief executive officer, CEEW, said, “India offers one of the largest renewable energy markets operating on market principles. The performance of the RE sector in this quarter has further reiterated the promise the sector holds. To meet the 450 gigawatts renewables target, India needs investments worth more than USD 200 billion for generating capacity alone. Significant additional funds will be required for supporting infrastructure such as storage and transmission. The focus must now be on reducing the cost of finance and embracing innovative financing models such as a time-bound credit enhancement scheme to accelerate the growth of the sector.”
The report also indicated a decline in quarterly capacity auctioned, with 2.97 GW RE capacity auctioned in Q3 FY21, compared to 4.4 GW in Q1 FY21 and 3.2 GW in Q2 FY21.
“This might be due to challenges faced by the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) in finding adequate buyers for the previously tendered (higher tariff) capacities in the face of rapidly declining tariffs and discoms’ grid integration,” it reasoned.
Nikhil Sharma, Associate, CEEW-CEF, said, “SECI needs to ensure power purchase assurance with discoms to attract bidders and provide an upside of the rapidly declining tariffs to discoms to regain momentum in the quarterly capacity auctioned.”
On the discom payables front, there was only a 1% increase in overdues in Q3 FY21, compared to a 30% spike in Q1 FY21. As of December 2020, the amount overdue by discoms was INR 1.43 lakh crore.
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India needs a 15TW RE System by 2050 to meet all its Energy Needs… yes Transportation…EV’s, Ships, Aircraft; Industry… Steel, Cement, PetroChemicals etc, Commercial/Residential too.
India, therefore, needs to ramp up to 500GW/yr or about 50GW/month if it wants to eliminate human suffering, deaths, Climate Change and restore the Environment to the Pre-Industrial Era by 2050.
This can EASILY be done by using AgriVoltaics (AV) on barely 4% of India’s 2.5 Million km2 of Agricultural Land in 2050. These “Record Breaking” 1.1 GW/quarter or 0.4GW/month is a very small step but will simply NOT DO IT….
Will somebody wake up the PM and his Colleagues and their numerous “Think Tanks”…. to put a stop to the “Killing Fields of India” … the Fossil and Nuclear Power Plants and convert Nuclear/Fossil Fuel Users identified above… to RE Energy….. NOW…. Please..!!!