Residential PV

Infrastructure finance provider PTC India Financial Services (PFS) has partnered with U.S.-India Clean Energy Finance (USICEF) initiative to fund the most promising, investment-ready distributed solar projects in India.

This revived growth comes mainly from markets outside of China, which are forecast to rise by 43% in 2019.  While China will grow marginally by 2%, Europe will add over 7 GW with utility-scale installations in Spain alone contributing 60% of the growth in the region. The USA will overtake India to once again become the second-largest PV market.

The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector is expected to make a significant contribution to India’s rooftop PV target of 40 GW by 2022. However, a range of issues — including low public awareness, the scarcity of low-cost financing and the need for rooftop aggregation models — must be addressed before rooftop solar can be aggressively scaled up, according to a new report from Deloitte and the Climate Investment Funds (CIF).

The latest government initiative that offers central financial assistance for Group Housing Societies and Residential Welfare Associations would help better adoption of rooftop solar among residential power consumers, which account for only around 9% of the total rooftop solar systems installed in the country (against almost 70% by industrial and commercial users).

The municipal council of Karimnagar has mandated rooftop solar on new buildings of a certain size as part of the Ministry of New & Renewable Energy’s Smart City Mission, which requires 10% of municipal energy to be generated from solar.

The President of India has sanctioned financial outlay of Rs 11,814 crore for phase II of grid-connected rooftop solar programme to achieve ‘40 GW by 2022’ target.

While commissioning is expected to slow down in FY 2018-19 due to the impact of the safeguard duty and GST issues, FY 2019-20 is weak due to delay in auction as several tenders got delayed/cancelled. However, FY2019-20 onwards, solar capacity additions are expected to pick up due to several factors including subsiding/removal of the safeguard duty (which would ease cost pressures).

Brussels-based SolarPower Europe and the National Solar Energy Federation of India (NSEFI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for cooperation on operation & maintenance (O&M), installation quality, digitalisation and storage.

A state hamstrung by low irradiance, tough terrain and regular flooding is trying to move forward its energy transition. Previously, the largest solar project in Assam had a generation capacity of only 5 MW.

The organization responsible for coordinating India’s push for 100 GW of new solar capacity by 2022 has had a busy week. But, as last year illustrated, tenders alone are not always a guarantee of new generation assets.