Even in India's sunny cities, rooftop solar systems come under a cloud

Inconsistent regulatory policies, high costs, patchy implementation of subsidy scheme and lack of awareness are some of the hurdles

With its many advantages, rooftop solar systems could have been the most popular power alternative in India's homes and establishments: It is sustainable, causes minimal distribution losses, allows dedicated transmission and requires no land use. Yet, as of December 2020, it makes for only about 20% of all the solar energy capacity installed in the country--6,792 MW of the total of 34,197 MW.

To understand the reasons, we picked Nagpur, a central Indian city with 300 sunny days a year, for a two-part investigation. The average annual solar radiation in Nagpur is about 5.09 kWh/m2/day. To put it in context,