India will need to invest $23 billion over the next five years to meet its target for 2022 of 40GW of rooftop photovoltaics, according to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
Accelerating India’s Clean Energy Transition, published at the BNEF Future of Energy Summit in Shanghai, examines the trends in India’s rooftop solar, rural mini-grid, off-grid and utility-scale renewable energy segments. India’s government has set its sights on having 175GW of non-hydro renewables capacity by 2022 (made up of 60GW onshore wind, 60GW utility-scale solar, 10GW bioenergy, 5GW small hydro and 40GW rooftop solar). At present, this figure stands at just 60GW.
India is accelerating development of renewable energy projects to provide cheap, reliable and clean power to its 1.3 billion people. The country’s percapita on-grid electricity consumption increased by 22% over the four years ending March 2017 due to increased industrial activity, higher uptake of electrical appliances by residential electricity users and the addition of new consumers to the grid.
The majority of the capacity in the 2022 target – a total of 135GW – is utility-scale (wind farms and solar parks, in particular) and does not include large hydro projects. The report estimates that India will need to invest $83 billion to build this capacity. The good news is that, because of falling capital costs per MW, that figure is $19 billion less than in BNEF’s previous estimates.
