Why Solar Energy matters for India’s energy needs ?

For every nation, energy is considered a key driving force for it’s growth. When developing countries like India with over 1.2 Billion population wants to grow, It requires a continues supply of energy to support the economic growth. To put in laymen term, say a city has about 10 factories, which produce many products and generates employment for the people of the city. This creates wealth for the government in the form of taxes. Profitability of the factory is a key factor which depends on so many factors. One of them is continue supply of power for uninterrupted production. If a country has sufficient resources to generate power, it may be able to provide power to its factories at a cheaper rate and without interruptions. Since most of the power in our country is generated from Coal, production cost is dependent on import cost of the coal. However now, with solar power, one can generate power on their own and reduce dependency on foreign import of fuel. If India is able to make surplus power then it will be able to provide power at cheaper rate to the factories thereby making production more viable.

At present, India has installed capacity of around 330 GW of power, of which solar only represents around 12 GW, i.e. 3.7% of total capacity. We are mostly dependent on coal for most of our power requirement. In next 5 years, solar power installed capacity is going to be five times the present capacity and could achieve 100 GW. If we compare our energy demand with that of developed country like USA, USA has installed capacity of over 1000 GW of power, which is around three times of India’s installed capacity. Mind you, USA generates a large portion of its demand from nuclear , which is about 200 GW, while India does not have that much of nuclear power capacity. That means if India continue to walk on footsteps of a developed country, it needs to generate more power from other resources. Only renewable sources, which do not require dependency on imported fuel can help India achieve the energy security.

It can be said that solar energy, which is the most promising energy among renewable energies can support India in a big way, specifically when cost of production of solar is now lower than cost of coal power.