Rooftop Solar And SUPRABHA

The Government of India (GoI) has targeted to achieve 100 GW solar capacity deployment by 2022 to achieve energy security from its abundant untapped solar resource. In concurrence, facilitated measures by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) have thus far enabled to achieve close to 39 GW deployment till June 2020 with an additional 35 GW in the pipeline. However, out of the achieved capacity, the contribution of rooftop solar (RTS) is relatively low compared to ground-mounted solar. Several initiatives have been undertaken to give impetus to the RTS sector such as central financial assistance, concessional financing and technical assistance supports to states. The recent MNRE Phase-II Rooftop Solar Scheme is a progressive step in energizing the sector by incentivizing utilities to take a leading role in RTS development and adopting a renewed focus on the previously underserved residential sector.

To support the path laid by MNRE and to enable a holistic development of the ecosystem, the World Bank initiated SUPRABHA, a USD 13m technical assistance program in 2017 and appointed EY to spearhead the work under this program. EY, as the PMC, has acted as the umbrella organization for managing and monitoring the activities with all the implementation partners as well as worked on generating potential new areas in consultation with clients. Since its inception, the program has been working with 17 Indian states on several interventions clubbed broadly under the buckets of Policy & Regulatory, Capacity Building, Demand Aggregation, Process Streamlining and Media & Outreach.

Numerous challenges impeding the growth of RTS exist in the domains of policy and regulation, institutional, financial and quality, faced by stakeholders such as developers, utilities and consumers. A relatively unsure policy regime wherein many instances of unexpected actions that have contributed to hampering the growth of RTS in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra are worth mentioning. An unclear duty regime has also led to creating doubts in the minds of stakeholders regarding investing in the sector. Other key issues such as priority sector lending hurdles, debt financing issues, hurdles in serving the MSME sector, liquidity issues in tendering, adoption of business models and need for digitization for utilities, permissions for open access and virtual/group net metering have also acted as roadblocks to the sector reaching its full potential.

In the face of these challenges, sustained efforts by SUPRABHA on all aspects of demand aggregation from formulating bidding documents, outreach and post-bid support have led to the aggregation of 372 MW of capacity through assessment of 4325 sites across 11 states. The state of Madhya Pradesh achieved record lowest tariff @ INR 1.38/kWh with 45% capital subsidy. The program has also trained more than 1000 bank officials, utility engineers, trainers and entrepreneurs. Apart from this, notable work has been done with regulators on updating regulations, MSMEs on financing aspects, states on policy formulation and Unified Web Portals and with NISE on monitoring frameworks. Today, the program has plunged headlong into supporting the MNRE Ph-II program as well as dealing with unforeseen eventualities by exploring digitization of the sector in a big way.

SUPRABHA is also geared up to work in tandem with the vision laid out in One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG) of India being at the fulcrum of a global solar grid or network. This will involve a lot of cross-national dissemination of learnings and co-ordination. SUPRABHA, with its deep learnings from working in the Indian ecosystem will be in a favorable position to assist the government in any endeavor towards meeting the goals of this mega international venture.

If the flurry of actions observed in local manufacturing (manifested by proposals of over 10 GW  of fresh solar equipment manufacturing received by MNRE), progressive steps such as SECI issuing tender for selection of developers for supply of 5 GW  of round-the-clock (RTC) power from grid-connected RE projects and a subsequently discovered tariff of INR 2.90 (~US$ 0.038) per unit  are a sign of the times of come, it bodes well for India’s energy future as well as on RTS seeing sunnier days ahead.