India is about to eclipse Australia for installed solar capacity – and two states account for over half the country’s solar PV.
According to figures released (PDF) by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, India had reached 4010.648MW of solar by early this month. Australia had 1,416,702 rooftop PV systems, representing 4242.794 MW of installed solar panel capacity as of May 2015; plus a handful of large scale systems.
It won’t be long before India is looking at Australia’s tally in its rear view mirror.
Last week, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi gave the nod for a massive increase India’s solar target under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM). The JNNSM target has been quintupled; from 20,000MW (20GW) to 100,000 MW (100GW) by 2022. The target will be split between 40 GW small scale and 60 GW medium and large scale projects.
The new target could create an estimated one million jobs or more according to analysis performed by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) earlier this year.
India’s ramp-up of solar has been impressive considering only 18 MW was installed by the end of 2010 – and the pace of installation will only increase.
Two of India’s 29 states have already installed more than 1GW of solar – Rajasthan, with 1163.7MW and Gujarat with 1000.05MW.
India is also using the JNNSM to foster local manufacturing under the “Make In India” program. It sets a target of 4-5GW of solar manufacturing capacity by 2020.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party was swept to power in May 2014, partly based on clean-power generation being the administration’s top energy-related priority.
India is attracting a huge amount of interest from solar developers around the world, including the world’s largest; SunEdison (NYSE: SUNE). The company is nurturing a significant pipeline of projects in the country; such as a 5GW deal with the state government of Karnataka signed early this year. In October last year, SunEdison signed an MoU with Rajasthan’s government to build 5GW of mega-scale (above 500MW in capacity) solar farms in the state.
In February, SunEdison also announced a goal of delivering renewable electricity to 20 million people in underprivileged communities throughout the world by 2020; with millions in India to benefit.
