Sunroof power

Suryodaya Yojana must address the challenges

The Pradhan Mantri Suryodaya Yojana, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 22, aims to install rooftop solar panels at 10 million homes. The details of the policy are yet to be announced, but the broad intent is clear: To provide the poor and middle-class households with a clean and cheaper source of electricity. On the face of it, rooftop solar power offers a meaningful way to achieve universal electrification targets, since it precludes the need for last-mile connectivity infrastructure of the conventional electricity-generating models. It is also a useful means of moving the needle on India’s international renewable energy commitments. India aims to have 50 per cent of its installed energy-generation capacity coming from renewable sources. But to achieve this, the new scheme must address several challenges that rooftop solar projects have faced since inception.

The Suryodaya Yojana is the fourth rooftop solar scheme to be announced since 2010, when the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission was launched. The second had come in 2015 to incentivise households and state power distribution companies (discoms) to install projects. In 2017, the government had announced the Solar Transfiguration of India (SRISTI) scheme, which sought to strengthen discoms’ role as the nodal agency for implementing rooftop solar schemes by offering financial incentives. The upshot of 13 years of policy support has been a grid-connected rooftop solar installed capacity of just 11 Gw. While 70,000 to 80,000 homes are powered by solar energy at present, the deadline to achieve the 40-Gw installed capacity target has been pushed from 2022 to 2026.

Lack of awareness, high cost and poor availability of financing options, and discoms’ reluctance to implement such projects are the three major hurdles in the wider adoption of rooftop solar systems. To be successful, therefore, the Suryodaya Yojana will have to work on convincing people of the benefits. But doing so would first require the demonstration of several successful projects. As for costs, the bill to set up a rooftop solar plant can range from Rs 2.2 lakh to Rs 3.5 lakh. And the few available financing options are accessible only to the rich or upper-middle class. Given that most Indian households fall within the low-consumption slab, rooftop solar will become feasible only with heavy subsidy support. Financing also plays a role in discoms’ reluctance, as most fear that a net metering system will lead to a loss of revenue from high-value consumers and worsen their already weak finances. 

The Suryodaya Yojana is the first scheme to set a target for the number of households rather than the amount of electricity to be generated. The aggregate number seems ambitious, but it is quite modest when set against the potential. According to a report by the independent think-tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water, over 250 million households across India have the potential to deploy 637 Gw of solar energy capacity on rooftops. To be sure, the government has now gained the institutional experience of implementing household infrastructure programmes for toilets, drinking water and cooking gas. But bringing rooftop solar power to less affluent households might require addressing a new set of challenges.