India has set a goal of generating 40 GW of green energy from rooftop solar by 2022, but it has only managed to reach 20% of that so far.
As India approaches 2022, it is becoming increasingly evident that obtaining a 40-gigawatt installed capacity from rooftop solar by that year is practically unachievable.
The 40 GW goal was set in 2015 as part of India’s effort to achieve 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022. The plan was then increased to 450 GW by 2030, however, large-scale solar power projects will account for the majority of the capacity in both scenarios.
India has attained a renewable energy installed capacity of 100 GW, but large-scale wind and solar power plants have the majority shares of around 78%. This is when scientists and environmentalists have frequently promoted rooftop solar as a viable alternative to large-scale renewable energy projects, which have several environmental and social drawbacks. By the end of July, the country had installed roughly 5.1 GW of rooftop solar.
In reality, communities losing land to large-scale renewable energy projects have been vocal in their opposition.
Ecological concerns
Large solar farms sometimes need a large amount of water to keep the panels in good working order. This is a problem in states like Rajasthan, where water is a valuable resource, according to Debajit Palit, Director of The Energy and Resources Institute’s Rural Energy and Livelihoods program.
Apart from the environmental and social problems that accompany the siting of renewable energy plants, there are other ecological concerns as well. For example, ground-mounted solar panels may result in the loss of any existing flora, putting local animals, both large and tiny, in jeopardy. Some habitats are in more danger than others. The great Indian bustard, whose habitat in Rajasthan is threatened by renewable energy installations, is one striking example.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru, Mr. Nitin Pandit said, “The big issue is for habitats that are classified incorrectly.”
Such as “wastelands”, he said, a term from the 1970s and a vestige of India’s colonial past that includes many of the country’s pristine grasslands and scrublands. But these are ecologically precious systems that pre-date forests in India; calling them “wastelands”, therefore, is “willful ignorance” on the part of the government because we have known for long that it is “substantially wrong”, further he added.
The “National Wastelands Atlas of India” details the status of such “wastelands” in India’s several states. From 2008-09 to 2015-2016, about 8,400 square kilometers of the region were moved into the “non-wastelands class,” according to the latest 2019 data. Experts point out, however, that such regions frequently contain grasslands and savannas, as well as a large number of India’s semi-arid open natural habitats.
According to one of a recent research mapping India’s semi-arid open natural habitat, fewer than 5% of open natural ecosystems are covered by India’s current protected area network, even though they encompass about 3,00,000 sq km (or 10% of the country’s geographical area). “In recent years, one of the most serious threats to open natural ecosystems has arisen ironically from India’s worldwide leadership role in large-scale deployment of renewable energy technologies like grid-scale solar farms,” wrote the authors of the article.
Rooftop Solar’s Potential
In its early years, rooftop solar, which many conservationists recommend India focus on, grew at a spectacular rate. Rooftop solar was the fastest growing renewable energy sub-sector in India between 2012 and 2018, according to research published in 2019 by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis on the country’s rooftop solar potential. Despite this, after the first run, it dropped behind.
Although rooftop solar in India is still in its infancy, a representative for Tata Power, one of India’s major power providers that install solar on residential, commercial, and industrial rooftops, believes the industry has enormous potential. “Additionally, a variety of advances can improve this.”
Microinverters, for example, enabling increased power output even in the shade (where typical rooftop solar is less effective), and novel applications that allow solar panels to be mounted on building facades and apartment balconies, he added.
Electricity, however, is a concurrent subject falling under the ambit of both the state and center, he said. “But polity at the level of state governments, together with the impact of Covid-19, has not enabled the growth expected in the last two years, because rooftop solar is not seen as a necessity.”
The policies of the center, too, left a lot to be desired. According to Vibhuti Garg, an energy economist and one of the report’s co-authors, policy ambiguity on net vs. gross metering has added to the confusion. Net metering allows residential or commercial solar energy producers to export excess energy back to the grid (which is deducted from their electricity bills), whereas gross metering pays them a fixed rate for the total power generated while they pay power distribution companies for the energy they use.
“A middle ground needs to be achieved as with gross metering, consumers have no incentive to deploy expensive solar rooftops,” she emphasized. “Uncertainty over duties also needs to be resolved.”
Further, he added, “They are close to the end-user, they already have the electricity infrastructure in place, it will require some modification but nowhere near as putting it miles and miles away and running huge transmission towers to connect the 100, 200, 500 MW solar farms that just decimate the countryside. Policymakers should focus much more energy in making such end-user-driven, distributed energy interventions more viable than to take the easy route.”
Rooting for rooftop
All parties believe that several improvements may be done to help rooftop solar gain traction. It is critical to make a policy change.
The Head of the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay, Mr. Rangan Banerjee said, “When we started, we saw many centralized projects amounting to 100 or 500 MW. But in any situation, decentralized RE – such as rooftop solar – is more sustainable. Land is always a problem, so it makes more sense to go for distributed photovoltaic rather than centralized, but the way structures of society, politics and business exist this is unlikely to happen unless this is pushed forward actively.”
Decentralization is indeed key, agreed Debajit Palit. “With this, electricity can be used closer to the generation point to decrease transmission and distribution losses,” he said.
This is one of the primary reasons why rooftop solar outperforms large-scale solar across the country. Furthermore, storing energy – such as through the use of batteries – will be critical to the future success of solar rooftops, since customers will no longer be reliant on discoms for electricity, according to Garg.
“It would also result in an avoided cost for discoms to build infrastructure for the supply of electricity to such consumers for only some part of the day. But for this, India needs to implement time of day pricing so that investors and developers will be encouraged to deploy batteries in India along with solar rooftop,” further, she added.
“However, focusing on rooftop solar does not mean that large-scale utility projects should be shelved altogether. Large scale solar would be useful as long as projects are sited properly, such as in areas that are already degraded like abandoned mines. We are not opposing solar energy by any means – not at all. But we should do it properly. The best way to do that would be to first target the grey and dark infrastructure where we can site solar so that it won’t take away our precious ecological assets. These are great places for installations. Also, whenever a large plant is proposed, we need to conduct a cost-benefit analysis by comparing it with an alternative that is much more end-user based. We need to start from what the requirement is and then go from there,” said Pandit.
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