Asia Report: World Takes Hard Look at India Grid, Promises of Solar

By Renewable Energy World Editors
06 August 2012 

 

Suddenly, the world is intrigued by India's unstable grid and the role solar can play in providing solutions for a country desperately in need of a new energy strategy.

India has in recent months been laying the groundwork to eventually become a major solar market, but the process has gone slower than expected. Sometimes markets develop methodically over many years, and other times they are jolted into urgency. Japan needed a major nuclear crisis to realign its priorities. And now it looks like India received its wake-up call in the form of a massive power outage that affected more than 600 million of its residents.

That in turn has drawn intense media coverage as major new organizations bring focus to India’s structural problems. Many of the stories have focused on the roots and challenges of India’s piecemeal energy system. Others point to the need for a massive overhaul of a grid that has become increasingly incapable of serving the 24/7 need of its growing urban population.

Regardless of where you look in India, solar power has taken a prominent seat at the table for a country eager to continue its economic momentum. And while it’s true that most of the conversation has been about how solar and better infrastructure could provide more stability, much of the new reporting is taking readers to those remote villages where off-grid solar is quietly increasingly quality of life and productivity.

This past week, Mahesh Bhave of the Indian Institute of Management wrote about the need to refocus some of the attention on the role distributed generation plays in creating economic stability.

There are several solar energy solutions. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is mostly focused on using solar energy, like any other fuel source, to feed the grid. Typically, this is through concentrated solar solutions, and recently through photovoltaic panels due to price drops. Solutions that feed power to the grid are important, but they only augment an over-stressed grid — they do not help the millions without any grid power. The Ministry mostly ignores distributed generation, the solar self-sufficiency solutions like rooftop panels or community grids.