Rooftop Solar PV in India-Scaling up by Discom-driven demand aggregation

December 21, 2023

India’s installation of rooftop solar (RTS) photo voltaic (PV) is far behind the Government of India’s target of achieving 40 GW of RTS PV installation by 2022. While the year of achieving the RTS PV installation target has been revised by the government to 2026, the capacity remains unchanged. Although there is currently no definitive information on overall residential rooftop capacity in the public domain, residential RTS PV has a very nominal share of the total rooftop solar PV installed capacity of 10.9 GW, with about 2 GW accounting for about 20 per cent of the overall RTS PV capacity.

This report argues, based on a cost–benefit analysis for DISCOM-driven residential RTS PV in ten selected states, that residential rooftops can contribute about 29 GW of residential RTS PV by 2030 even if the most conservative approach is followed. On the basis of potential of residential RTS PV and developments in its commercial and industrial (C&I) segment, it becomes important to consider scaling residential RTS PV to increase the share of the generation of clean power feeding into the grid. This requires experimenting with various models, involving multiple stakeholders.