Noor Mohammad
(The Wire, India)
New Delhi, March 11, 2018
The International Solar Alliance (ISA) Summit being held in New Delhi today (Sunday, March 11, 2018) at the Cultural Centre, Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Heads of state from 23 nations including France, Australia and Sri Lanka are expected to attend the event which is being hosted jointly by India and France to promote solar energy.
Besides Heads of State, Deputy Prime ministers and energy ministers have confirmed their participation in the summit.
Several global bankers including Werner Hoyer, president and chairman, European Investment Bank, K V Kamath, President, BRICS Development Bank, Nandita Parshad, Managing Director, Energy and Natural Resources, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Banbang Susantono, Vice President, Asian Development Bank are also due to participate in the jamboree.
President Ram Nath Kovind, along with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, will host the Summit, which will focus on various aspects of promoting solar energy in ISA member countries, including credit mechanisms, crowd funding and sharing of technology breakthroughs.
The Summit may provide Prime Minister Narendra Modi an opportunity to score some political brownie points with green activists and the Indian electorate but is unlikely to give any big push to solar energy itself.
US pull out
This is because mobilising financial resources for additions to global solar capacity has become tougher after the United States backed out from the Paris Climate Agreement, under which industrialised countries have committed to provide US$ 100 billion a year from 2020 onwards to developing countries to help them fight climate change and implement mitigation and adaptation measures.
The Pledged Fund
The Pledged Fund is meant to support renewable energy, energy efficiency, forest conservation and other projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The money would also help poorer countries adapt to the consequences of climate change.
For example, climate finance could fund levees to protect cities from flooding, environmental experts have said.
In 2014, the US offered about US$ 2.7 billion in climate finance, a sum comparable with contributions from Germany and France. If it refuses to finance climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, industrialised countries could have a hard time keeping their promise to offer US$ 100 billion in climate finance every year from 2020, analysts said.
US$1 trillion target
The ISA itself is a treaty-based international body for promotion of solar energy in 121 countries, which are fully or partially between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
It has targeted to mobilise $1 trillion in financing and deploy solar capacities of 1000 GW by 2030 as part of the strategy for the mitigation of climate change.
Potential fault lines
However, India can neither supply technology nor provide the financing needed for the massive capacity addition envisaged by the ISA. Its proposal to impose a safeguard duty on solar equipment is not likely to inspire confidence among ISA members.
In the last few years, cheaper supply of panels and modules helped India bring down per unit solar tariffs to the level where the technology could compete with fossil fuel-generated electricity. That led India to hike its solar capacity addition target five times to 100,000 MW by 2022.
Solar power tariffs in India have fallen by nearly 80% since 2010, hitting a record low of Rs 2.44 (about US$ 0.03) a unit in May 2017. This is thanks to an over 80% reduction in Chinese module prices, according to Mercom, a company that provides market intelligence on the clean energy sector.
Safeguard Duty
But now, under pressure from local manufacturers, India plans to slap a safeguard duty on solar equipment imports, ignoring the fact that it lacks domestic manufacturing capacity to meet the equipment requirements of the envisaged capacity addition in solar.
In any event, India’s domestic content requirement policy for solar equipment has already been successfully challenged by the US at the WTO. No surprise, India’s procurement regime for solar equipment is under the scanner.
China leads global capacity in PV solar, which accounts for 98.4% of total solar capacity. Japan comes second, followed by Germany, the US and Italy.
The Challenges
The National Solar Mission is a part of India’s Action Plan on Climate Change, which was unveiled in June 2008. However, solar capacity addition did not pick up in initial years due to high tariff and widespread skepticism about viability of this clean source of energy.
But the percentage share of solar energy in India’s total power mix has steadily risen since 2012 on the back of falling equipment prices.
The share of solar energy was just 0.23% in January 2012 but has since risen to 5.9% at the end of this January, though share in generation still remains low due to low conversion factor (just 17% compared to 80-90% for coal-based power projects).
Noor Mohammad writes on Energy issues. The above article appeared in ‘The Wire,’ (thewire.in) Web Edition on March 10, 2018. It has been reproduced here with the permission of Siddharth Varadarajan, one of its Founding Editors. Established in India on May 10, 2015, as an editorially and financially independent entity, ‘The Wire’ is committed to promoting the values of democracy and journalism.
*
Photo Caption:
Solar Energy Panels
Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash
All Tables from The Wire (India)
Little ray of hope-India-Key Milestones in Solar Energy.docx
Little ray of hope-India-Top Solar Module Manufacturers.docx
Little ray of hope-Leaders in % Share of PV Solar Capacity.docx
