International Solar Alliance is making a huge impact in poor countries: Ajay Mathur

There are two notable points. First membership of ISA has increased tremendously. Today 116 already members, another 4 who will join between now and December. That is a huge plus point. 

Second is, we have started making impact in the countries we are working. Right now, we are working in 55 countries on a variety of programmes – skill training programmes, helping them with regulatory and policy stuff, getting RE off the ground, helping them projects worth 9.5 GW, helping them pull in finance—by developing the Global Finance Facility, identifying start-ups which could become the Amazons of tomorrow. All of these have started having an impact. 

Yesterday (October 31), we dedicated four projects which we had completed (to the countries housing them). One project in Fiji—a health facility was solarised. There is a school on a very remote island; this school was solarised, with battery, so that electricity is available all the time.  

Like this, we have completed 11 projects, another 12 will be completed by December and there are four more planned These are real live actions occurring in the least developed countries. 

So far 1 GW of projects have been installed and another 9.5 GW are under construction. Each one of them is small, but their impact is huge.  

One of the larger projects is a 600 MW solar plant in Cuba. Cuba had never done a bidding process, we helped the country do an auction for the first time. Previously rates were decided by negotiations. But we helped them come up with regulations for bidding. There was a payment security issue. The government came forward to provide a sovereign guarantee. 

In Malawi, the Parliament used to stop functioning because there was no electricity. We helped them set up a rooftop solar plant. Now, they are going in for the second phase.  

There were 3 or 4 key points. Lot of countries announced voluntary contributions. Many of them were developing countries—they saw the value of it, they saw the value ISA was providing. Developed countries like Germany, Denmark and the US also contributed.  

Roughly about $ 3 m was pledged yesterday. Developing countries, typically pledged around $ 10,000. Nigeria said it would set up a mechanism whereby some payment would be made to the ISA automatically every year. That was a huge endorsement of what we are doing. 

Second point was—we had earlier done a programme for identifying start-ups in Africa. Now the Assembly has approved that we will do a similar programme in Asia next. Then we will do one in Latin America then go back to Africa. The idea is to identify start-ups to develop ecosystem for solar.  

For 2024, we go ahead with projects we are working on. Now setting up Solar Technology Application Resource (STAR) centers in five countries this year and another five the next year. These will be housed in existing institutions and universities. We will help them with finance and staffing, but capacity building will be done locally. We will be looking at models through with they can become self-sustaining over a period of time. We are helping these countries to develop infrastructure to enable solar to be sustainable.  

Another big thing is the Global Solar Facility which we set it up last year. The goal is to get (a corpus of) $ 50 m; then we hire a pvt sector investment manager for Africa and then for Asia and Latin America. All these three silos will be managed by a parent company, which would be part of the ISA. We now have $ 40 million pledged and we hope by the end of the year we will cross $ 50 million. This facility will help set up decentralised solar applications. We hope that $ 200 m will be the ultimate size. This is a guarantee fund, leveraging will be very high, leveraging 14 times, and will be able to pull in investments. 

The world is investing a billion dollars a day in solar, but just about 3 per cent is coming to Africa. Why? Because the investors are not sure of getting their returns. This guarantee fund will give confidence to the investors.  

No, unfortunately it did not work out. Yes, we tried it for solar pumps and we found a price that was 52 per cent of the existing market prices. Unfortunately, it did not take up from that auction was zero because each country has its own procedure for procurement.  

What is possible, however, is –something we are working on –is developing common standards. Common standards for pumps exist, common standards for solar cold storage exist, common standards for mini grids exist. We are working on common standards for solar rooftop systems. 

What we are hoping is that the common standards would bring costs down because people will not be manufacturing many different kinds of products.