Good News for the Indian Solar Industry
Revision in the Minimum floor price set between EU-China and its Implications
March 26, 2014More problems for the DCR projects queued up in India
March 28, 2014New Support Scheme for the Indian PSUs
There are talks about new PV support schemes for the Indian state owned companies/ PSUs. These plans have been 
initiated by the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and are in their initial stage now. These support schemes may help India to reach the 100 MW capacity eligibility from the 50 MW level at present. The PSUs have no dearth of capital or land and hence are a great resource for the expansion of solar industry in India. The large PSUs in India like ONGC, BHEL, NTPC, SECI and Power Grid have the resources of setting up solar plants with capacity upto 1 GW. They have the ability and power to make a difference to the Indian Solar Industry.
However with the amount of red tape and bureaucracy in India, little can be expected. India suffers from high prices of fossil fuel and electricity. Solar Energy can be and should be the answer to all such worries. Hence the only ray of hope for India to overcome this can be through harnessing the solar energy. With solar demand expected to be ~50 GW in 2014, India should also try and strike a position in the world market. China, Japan and USA are expected to be the largest markets in 2014. Though countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa have also become very important markets. Hence this new policy support scheme could come as a boon for the Indian Solar Industry. I am highly optimistic about the whole thing, if we ignore the corruption and red tape mechanism in India.
“There is a lot of interest [among PSUs] and these are cash-rich companies, so there is a proposal for a separate scheme under which public sector companies can invest,” said SECI’s senior manager for PV, Bharath Reddy. “However, discussions are still in the early stage.”
“PSUs can be a great push for solar,” said Refex Energy Ltd’s MD, Anil Jain. “With the kind of balance sheet and bandwidth they have, they can set up big plants in the range of 500 MW to 1 GWW in a short space of time.
“Many of the PSUs and other government entities are sitting on huge land banks and utilizing them for setting up solar power plants can be a great idea.”
2 Comments
Generation companies of state government (Genco) are also very much resourceful and have abundant infrastructure facilities to install both solar PV and CSP based plants. State government should entrusted this job to Genco for encouraging soar power plant in their state.
Sneha,
Solar power is still not commercially feasible solution. Government of India is giving subsidiary (up to 85%) on capital expenditure. Please share business case for it so that we will have good understanding about it.
|Also, make sure that your article is technically correct. |Please check below sentence:
With *solar* *electricity* demand expected to be ~50 GW in 2014.