India’s solar revolution: small is big by Justin Guay

A while back I wrote a post on the need to get India's solar boom right. I wrote it because it was obvious that solar energy was primed to take off in India and it was clear there were two paths the country could take -- distribute that boom to benefit the 300 million people still waiting for the grid, or forcibly centralize a resource that is most effective when distributed. Now a year later installations have grown at a blistering pace -- from 80 MW a year ago to over 1 GW -- but they are almost entirely centralized. As Indian states line up exciting new solar policies the central question remains: To centralize or not to centralize?

Let's start with hard reality: The grid is never coming to rural India. No matter what 'very serious policy-makers' want to believe, decades of attempts and huge gains in supply have yielded little increase in electrification. More importantly, off-grid solar installations have been dramatically cheaper than grid extensionfor a while because they compete with the huge costs of extending the grid and the huge costs of diesel and heavily polluting kerosene. That's why the future ofrural electrification is decentralized clean energy something even the very serious IEA recognizes.