Taking cue from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assurance following the Ayodhya temple consecration that one crore households will probably be electrified through rooftop photo voltaic installations, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Interim Budget 2024-25, reiterated that dedication.
| Photo Credit: S.S. Kumar
Taking cue from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assurance following the Ayodhya temple consecration that one crore households will probably be electrified through rooftop photo voltaic installations, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Interim Budget 2024-25, reiterated that dedication. “Through rooftop solarisation, one crore households will be enabled to obtain up to 300 units free electricity every month…. this would translate to benefits of ₹15,000-18,000 annually for households from free solar electricity and selling the surplus to the distribution companies,” she mentioned in her tackle.
The common all India family consumption of electricity is about 100 units a month, with solely few States reminiscent of Delhi approaching shut to 300 units, counsel public knowledge. The net-metering coverage permits customers of rooftop solar energy to provide their surplus energy again to the grid and thus offsetting their electricity payments.
Whether the federal government would fund new installations or solely subsidise these putting in new ones — the latter has been a follow for years — and the demographic that the scheme was concentrating on was not laid out in Ms. Sitharaman’s tackle.
Last yr, the federal government spent ₹2,167 crore on its rooftop solar energy programme and for 2024-25, it has budgeted ₹4,555 crore, in accordance to the Budget paperwork up to date on Thursday.
India presently has about 11 GW of put in rooftop photo voltaic capability, of which solely 2.7 GW are in residential units and the remaining in business or industrial areas. There is not any centralised nationwide estimate of what number of of India’s estimated 30 crore households have rooftop photo voltaic units, although as The Hindu reported final month citing estimates from consultants, it’s unlikely to be over 10 lakh. The Finance Minister additionally didn’t point out a time line for the installations.
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) estimates the price of putting in a 1-2 kW (kilowatt) system at about ₹43,000 per unit. Units up to 3kW are eligible for a subsidy of about ₹14,000 per unit.
Limited consumption
India’s low uptake of rooftop photo voltaic methods is essentially due to restricted electricity consumption and current subsidies for coal-fired electricity that make even subsidised solar energy costly, urged the results of a analysis spanning 14,000 households throughout 21 States, a examine by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) had reported in November 2023.
Neeraj Kuldeep, Senior Programme Lead, CEEW mentioned in an announcement on Thursday that 20-25 GW price of rooftop photo voltaic capability could possibly be supported through solarisation of 1 crore households. Residential shoppers obtain subsidised electricity from distribution corporations (discom) and have been such households to ‘solarise,’ it will save discoms about ₹2 lakh crore over the subsequent 25 years (the photo voltaic plant’s life). “All States can leverage this chance as rooftop photo voltaic potential exists in every single place, in contrast to utility-scale photo voltaic (photo voltaic parks), which is primarily restricted to seven RE-rich States, he added.
Because solar energy is just out there throughout the day and battery storage methods are costly, the worldwide expertise with rooftop photo voltaic is that almost all households with photo voltaic panels additionally depend on electricity from the grid.
