Residential PV

The Beijing-headquartered Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—which recently approved a US$75 million loan to Tata Cleantech Capital—sees private-sector investment flowing into the nation’s solar and wind projects next month onwards.

State energy minister Nilesh Cabral says householders will be offered the chance to reduce energy bills without any upfront cost by leasing roofspace to installers as part of plans to add 15 MW of solar capacity in Goa by March.

The Smart Energy Hub can operate in electrolysis mode to store renewable energy as hydrogen, or in fuel cell mode to produce electricity and heat from previously produced hydrogen or methane. Its developers are the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and start-up Sylfen.

The state this week raised its clean energy ambition to 30 GW of generation capacity within three years as figures showed ground-mounted solar is expanding at a faster rate than rooftop installations.

The company aims to enable 1000 homes and businesses with rooftop plants during the initial launch of this scheme that provides EMI options of 12, 18, 24 and 36 months.

Industry body Gogla and the World Bank’s Lighting Global program said the last six months set a record for off-grid solar deployment. Solar home systems and other small off-grid appliances are being used in ever larger numbers.

Up to 70% of prospective customers have shied away from owning a rooftop solar system due to lack of readily available information on how to assess various solar options, says Saurabh Marda, co-founder and managing director of Freyr Energy – a Hyderabad-based rooftop solar firm that has completed over 1200 installations in just 5 years since inception in 2014.

Continuing delays in payments from utilities, regulatory uncertainty on tariff matters and tight financing have hit the industry hard.

Manufacturing sector accounts for 14% of rooftop installations among top end user industries. The sector added around 130 MW of rooftop capacity in FY2019.

This year will see strong growth for the global PV market, to 114 GW, and that pattern will continue in the years ahead, according to analyst Wood Mackenzie. A report has highlighted soaring inverter replacement costs for PV project owners as a side-effect of the solar success story.