India's solar dreams have a new backer in American energy experts. On the sidelines of the climate talks in Paris, a group of solar experts from Stanford University released a report calling India's solar goals a "global priority".
A major barrier to deploying renewable energy in India is a shortage of debt at attractive terms. Domestic debt in India has high cost, short tenor, and variable interest rates, adding 30% to the cost of renewable energy. Currently foreign debt is as expensive as domestic debt because it requires market-based foreign exchange hedging solutions.
India has ambitious targets for renewable energy growth. As part of its Union Budget 2015-2016, India aims to install 60 GW of wind power capacity and 100 GW of solar power capacity by 2022, which is more than six times the current installed capacities of approximately 22GW and 3GW, respectively.
India has ambitious targets for renewable energy growth. As part of its Union Budget 2015-2016, India aims to install 60 GW of wind power capacity and 100 GW of solar power capacity by 2022, which is more than six times the current installed capacities of approximately 22GW and 3GW, respectively.
The Government of India has set ambitious targets for renewable energy — a doubling of existing renew- able energy capacity to 55,000 MW by 2017. However, unsubsidized renewable energy is still 52-129% more expensive than conventional power, and requires policy support.
Renewable energy financing in emerging economies faces particularly daunting challenges, but there are creative policy solutions that could potentially reduce the cost of renewable energy support by as much as 30%.
Financing of renewable energy in India: Implications for policy - A presentation by Gireesh Shrimali, David Nelson, Shobhit Goel, Charith Konda, Raj Kumar at the 4th National Research Conference on Climate Change, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, October 26-27, 2013.
In 2008, India’s National Action Policy on Climate Change (NAPCC) set a target, called the Renewable Purchase Obligation (RPO), to produce 15% of the country’s electricity with renewable energy sources by 2020.
This new report published by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) analyzes the challenges for designing national policy that will attract the investment needed to spur rapid growth in wind and solar energy at a reasonable cost.
