(Updated) India’s Very Ambitious Solar Target Gets Even More Ambitious (Not Really)
By Siddharth Singh, 2nd April, 2016
Update: While the original piece is available below, turns out that the news article on which it was based was incorrect. The Power Minister tweeted the next day that he was misquoted. So our skepticism of the source article was not unfounded.
Original piece: This keeps getting bigger and bigger. So big, I had to double-check to see if the news had been published on the 1st of April.
Here’s the story. India’s government under Dr. Manmohan Singh had set the country’s solar power capacity target at 20,000 MW by 2022.
Then, after Narendra Modi took over as Prime Minister in 2014, Power Minister Piyush Goyal raised this target to 100,000 MW by 2022, a five fold increase.
This increase was treated with skepticism by a few, for good reason: a significant proportion of this was to be met by solar rooftop installations, which happen to be rather expensive for individual households (and institutions) to invest in, especially when complemented with battery storage.
But here’s how India has done:
In 2011, India’s solar capacity was at 20 MW.
In 2014, it rose to 2,400 MW.
In 2015, to 3,740 MW.
In January 2016, to 5,129 MW.
Now Power Minister Goyal has announced that (if the news report is to be believed) India’s capacity already crossed 19,000 MW by March, 2016.
A four fold increase in three months? Possible if several projects concluded construction in this period. However, it is also entirely possible that he was misquoted: perhaps he meant to say the capacity under construction and contracted out is 19,000 MW? Either way, the number is huge.
But here’s the biggie: the minister said that the 100,000 MW target is likely to be reached by 2017 itself, a full five years ahead of schedule!
If successful, that would mean solar capacity would have gone from 20 MW to 100,000 MW in only 6 years.
In comparison, coal-based power capacity went from 756 MW in 1947 to 130,000 MW in 2013. Natural gas went from 134 MW in 1966 to 20,000 MW in 2013.
The Power Minister has technological progress to thank, but his increased targets have certainly played a role in bolstering expectations and may have played a role in nudging along the economies of scale in this sector.
Here are a few relevant articles on Disruptions Collective on the march of solar power: 1. The financial challenge of India’s solar push. 2. Solar grid parity awaits. 4. Solar inching in on coal in India. 5. Solar and wind consistently beat forecasts.
But most important of all, here’s a word on how relative costs are currently calculated, and how they should instead be calculated.
And finally, do note: installed capacity is not the same as supply. Due to the intermittent nature of solar energy, actual supply of solar electricity to the grid will only be a fraction of the share of the installed capacity in the electricity mix.
