Govt to encourage adoption of rooftop solar projects

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 23

The government is working on preparing a comprehensive roadmap to encourage adoption of rooftop solar projects, especially by the city’s residential or domestic sector. The government aims to generate 2,000 mega watt (MW) of solar energy in the capital by the year 2025.

As a part of its efforts to encourage use of renewable energy in the capital, the government is launching a Solar Rooftop Demand Aggregation Program (SRDAP) for domestic customers.

The initiative will benefit customers including residential, schools, hospitals and municipal segments with an expected aggregate demand of 40 MW through Renewable Energy Service Company (RESCO) mode.

To understand opportunities and challenges in aggregating the consumer demand, the city government’s Department of Power today held a consultation workshop with various stakeholders for demand aggregation in residential sector.

Addressing the participants, city power minister Satyendar Jain said, “In promoting renewable energy, the residential sector is a key component especially in an urban setup like Delhi, and we are exploring ways and means to make it easy to adopt rooftop solar. The RESCO model enables this by minimising capital expenditure for homeowners and RWAs.”

Jain said the government’s aim is to generate 1,000 MW by 2020 and 2,000 MW by 2025 through Rooftop Solar Installations (RTS). This happens to be in line with the central government’s National Solar Mission which was rolled out in 2010 with a target of adding 100 GW of solar-based power by 2022. Approximately 40 per cent of this target is to be achieved from the RTS.

Principal Secretary (Power) Varsha Joshi said, “Through the SRDAP, the Delhi government envisages accelerating rooftop solar deployment by bringing the lenders, vendors and the utilities on the same platform.”