IST-Magazine India Sets Year-on-Year Targets to Reach Ambitious 2022 Solar Goal
India Sets Year-on-Year Targets to Reach Ambitious 2022 Solar Goal
In 2014, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a goal to increase solar power capacity to 100 Giga watts (GW) by 2022—five times higher than the previous target. The 2022 target is extremely ambitious (the world’s total installed solar power capacity was 181 GW in 2014) and would make India a global leader in renewable energy. Moreover, Piyush Goyal, India’s Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy, recently said that India aims to achieve its 100 GW solar target as early as the end of 2017.
India’s total installed solar power capacity stands at 5.8 GW, so the country will need to significantly ramp up the pace of solar capacity additions, from an average 4 GW per year to 15+ GW per year to meet the 2022 target. Critics have been skeptical, citing hurdles like poor transmission infrastructure and lack of access to finance. Yet recent signs show that the country is starting to make serious progress on how it will achieve its lofty solar goals.
According to the targets, India will add 12 GW of new solar power capacity this fiscal year, and add 15 GW and 16 GW of new solar capacity in FY2018 and FY2019, respectively. This will also bring the country closer to the government’s commitment of providing 24-hour electricity to all Indians by 2019.
Next Steps
Although India is on track to achieve its annual solar capacity addition target for this financial year, the government will need to do more in subsequent years to ensure that its targets are met. This is important not only for its solar commitment, but also for its national energy and climate change commitments–installing 175 GW of total renewable power capacity by 2022, and increasing the share of non-fossil-based power capacity from 30 percent today to about 40 percent by 2030 (with the help of international support). While the Indian government has taken positive steps to support the supply of solar on the grid, it should now also focus its attention on the demand for solar energy, by developing solutions that provide the private sector with access to affordable solar. These solutions must support distributed and off-grid generation systems, as well as the adoption of storage technologies—both of which are necessary to reach India’s ambitious solar goals.
Written by: IST Team Member
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