Commercial offices and industries are low-hanging fruits which can be targeted early as part of the country’s rooftop solar power mission, Minister for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday.

“Power tariffs in commercial offices, government offices, schools and industries are much higher than individual tariffs as they pay market rate. These are low-hanging fruits for the rooftop solar mission. But here, state electricity boards need to socialise and give up some of their high tariff yielding customers,” Goyal said, while speaking to senior officials from state Governments at a Workshop on Rooftop Solar Projects.

As part of the reworked national solar mission target of 100,000 MW by 2022, 40,000 MW is to come from rooftop solar projects.

Commercial offices and industries typically use diesel generators as a back-up to the grid-connected power. The blended cost of power for such entities comes to around ₹9-10 a unit.

Solar power developers like Azure Power, SunSource Energy and others have begun entering into power purchase agreements with such entities which brings down the blended cost of power by at least 15 per cent.

IREDA scheme To facilitate such rooftop solar project development, Goyal launched Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency’s (IREDA) loan scheme. IREDA will provide loans at 9.9-10.75 per cent to system aggregators and developers of rooftop projects.

Meanwhile, Goyal also urged the gathering to discuss how to bring down transmission costs for solar power.

On the criticism that the Government's solar mission will help Chinese manufacturers, Goyal said, “If we don't set high targets, how will domestic manufacturers get encouraged to produce more? It is our targets that have attracted interest from players like SoftBank who are willing to invest $20 billion over the next 10 years.”

Solar power equipment is still largely imported. Apart from where there is a requirement for certain percentage of domestic content, more than 60-70 per cent of the equipment is imported. The Minister also added that cheap electricity generated from coal-fired plants is also important to the solar mission. “Abundant cheap thermal power needs to be available to enable the bundling of solar power,” Goyal said.

Our Chennai bureau adds: The government is in talks with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank seeking $2 billion (₹13,000 crore) of funds. The funds would be used to provide cheaper loans for rooftop solar projects, Upendra Tripathy, Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said.

The funds would be used to provide interest subvention to banks — banks would provide cheap loans and would be reimbursed for their sacrifice of interest from the funds.

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