Chennai: India’s ambitious plan of reaching 40 gigawatt (GW) capacity in solar rooftop (SRT) has fallen well short of plans, a report said. The country had planned to reach the said numbers by 2022.
According to a report titled The State of Renewable Energy in India 2019 released by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), “Solar rooftop has failed to make any headway in the current market which is skewed towards large-scale renewable energy.”
“Till November 2018 only 1,334 megawatt (MW) of grid-connected solar rooftop systems had been installed,” the report said.
It also stated that the dominance of large-scale rooftop installations by commercial, industrial, institutional and government/PSU segments has meant that “attention to the residential solar rooftop segment has lagged behind.”
“Also, the preference has been for commercial and industrial installations residential consumers, who hold immense potential, account for less than 20 per cent of the total installed capacity,” the report said.
The report cites the Ministry of New and Renewable Energys SRISTI scheme (Sustainable Rooftop Implementation for Solar Transfiguration of India), launched in December 2017 that proposed Rs 23,450 crore incentives for discoms and consumers.
The report also called out the ‘flaws’ of the scheme. “(For one ) the subsidy itself: it may incentivise discoms to encourage rooftop installations, but it is designed to benefit them only over the shorter term while magnifying their revenue problems over the longer term,” the report said.