Vinayak Chatterjee's Infravisioning video series analyses and explains developments in India's infrastructure sector to the BQ Prime audience.
Edited excerpts of the video:
The village of Modhera with its 8,000 inhabitants is situated on the banks of the Pushpawati river, in the Mehsana district of Gujarat. It is a little over a two-hour drive north of Ahmedabad.
Until recently, it was famous for its iconic Sun Temple built by the Chalukyas and dedicated to the solar deity Surya. It is now famous for being India's first fully solarised village also. It is no coincidence that this village, housing the Sun God, achieved this status.
The Gujarat Power Corp. under its Surya Gram project installed solar rooftop systems free of cost for the entire village. It set up a six-megawatt ground mounted solar power plant along with a 15 MWH battery energy storage system, referred to as the BESS, at Sujanpur village nearby, about a kilometre from Modhera.
Solar panels of one KWH have been installed on the roofs of the 1,400 households in Modhera. Such systems have also been installed on public and institutional buildings in the village like the bus stand, police station, primary health centre and Panchayat office. There is also now an electric vehicle charging station and, of course, the Sun Temple gets illuminated at dusk.
The entire daytime power demand of Modera is met through the solar project and at night, the supplies are met through the BESS. On any average day, about 30,000 units of solar power are generated of which 5,500 units are consumed during the day, and 6,000 units are stored in the BESS. The excess power is fed into the state grid daily.
Residents confirmed that the electricity bills have come down drastically. A typical household that used to pay a monthly electricity bill of Rs 3,000 now needs to pay only Rs 1,000. Households are using more electrical gadgets, making daily life more comfortable. Thus, Modhera has not only become a net zero community but has also become a supplier of green energy to the grid.
While the Modhera example demonstrates the art of the possible, it must be remembered that these installations have been free of cost, borne by the central and Gujarat governments at a reported project outlay of Rs 81 crore.
Obviously, this is clearly not possible or desirable across all of India's six lakh plus villages. In fact, the national implementation of residential rooftop solar has been patchy and disappointing, though solar energy growth has been rapid since the inception of the National Solar Mission in January 2010.
The objective then was to achieve 20 GW of grid connected solar power project capacity by 2021-22. In 2015, this target was revised to 100 GW of which 40 GW was to be achieved through grid-connected rooftop photovoltaics, also referred to as RTPV and the balance 60 GW from utility scale products.
Of this, a large portion of 11.8 GW, or about 17%, of installations are at residential premises and 2 GW, or 61%, came from a single state of Gujarat. The biggest advantage of RTPV is that there is no additional capex for land, which is required.
Consumers can utilise their own premises to generate electricity and become prosumers, which means the combination of producers and consumers. But residential consumers tend to shy away from RTPV investments for a variety of reasons. These include an inability to afford upfront installation costs, hassles in arranging finance, free or highly subsidised retail tariffs for lower consumption, domestic usage, and principal agent challenges in rented homes.
In parallel, rooftop project developers find it expensive to aggregate demand from small residential consumers, long gestation periods and closing the sale cycle.
The irritations inherent in processing approvals from discoms for multiple locations are some of the debilitating reasons for demotivating installation agents. The pushback from discoms has largely come in the form of lobbying for changes to rules and regulations—primarily those with respect to sale of excess energy back to the grid for fear of losing cash paying customers.
For example, most states have now restricted the capacity size of RTPV for which net metering is allowed. In most states, this capacity restriction is of up to systems below 500 KW. Such limitations on net metering lower the financial viability for commercial and institutional consumers, who will have access to larger roof areas that can fit in bigger projects.
Discoms disinterest is a bit surprising, as sourcing from RTPV requires lower investments in securing transmission interconnections. Having a good proportion of RTPV increases the local distribution grid's efficiency and reliability also.
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has made repeated attempts to get RTPV moving for the residential sector. A fiscal incentive package was fashioned for this purpose. Central financial assistance is provided to residential consumers under a graded scheme based on project size.
This includes an advanced capital grant of up to 40% of project costs for systems up to three KW and 20% of project costs for systems between 3 and 10 KW. In addition, discoms are provided with performance-based incentives. This incentive is primarily meant to reimburse the discoms for additional expenditure incurred in providing supporting infrastructure, capacity building of discom staff, additional manpower and creating consumer awareness of rooftop solar installations.
Modhera in Gujarat has clearly demonstrated the scale of transformation possible in the lives of ordinary Indians in villages.
Globally, rooftop solar has been recognised as a tool to alleviate poverty. It monetises the free sunlight and serves as a kind of real direct benefit transfer.
Ideally, this movement should spread far and wide across India's countryside. A fresh scheme needs to be formulated that should draw upon all the learnings to date. This practical, monetisable and poverty alleviating opportunity should be pursued with vigour, just as electricity and water connections have been. Then every village in India could become a Sun Village.
Watch the full video here:
Vinayak Chatterjee is founder and managing trustee, The Infravision Foundation; and chairman, CII Mission On Infra, Trade & Investment.
The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.
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