India a front runner in solar energy production: Governor

Addressing a workshop on advanced solar PV Technologies and vendors meet at IIT Campus on Thursday, he said with an unswerving commitment to solar power, India is now emerging as a front runner in generation of solar energy.

The governor added that with a population of more than 125 crore, India is the world’s third largest consumer of electricity. Solar energy is a renewable source of energy and its inexhaustible and non-polluting nature makes it the perfect alternative to traditional energy sources.

Purohit said that the conversion of solar energy into electricity is normally done through a photovoltaic cell. Historically, the United States was the leader of installed photovoltaics for many years, and its total capacity amounted to 77 megawatts in 1996, more than any other country in the world at that time. Japan, he added, remained world leader in photovoltaics until 2004, when its capacity amounted to 1,132 megawatts. Then, focus on PV deployment shifted to Europe. In 2005, Germany took the lead from Japan. With the introduction of the Renewable Energy Act in 2000, feed-in tariffs were adopted as a policy mechanism.

The governor said that in 2015, China became the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic power, and in 2017 the first country to surpass the 100 GW of cumulative installed PV capacity. China is expected to be the leader in installed PV capacity, and along with India and US, its forecast will constitute the largest markets for solar PV installations in the coming decade.

In India, the total solar power generation capacity increased from 461 MW in 2011 to 6,763 MW in 2016. This has further gone upto 12288.83 MW as on March 21 2017. The installed solar capacity crossed 20 GW in January 2018, with 18.4 GW in the form of ground-mounted projects and 1.6 GW on rooftops. The solar power generation capacity in the country has increased tremendously mainly due to the favourable government initiatives coupled with advancements in the manufacturing technology of solar panels, the governor added.

Purohit said a report published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has stated that India installed 10 Giga Watt (GW) of Solar Power in 2017, thereby doubling its achievement of 2016.