‘Sunny Makes Money’: India installs a record volume of solar power in 2022
It's not just solar farms in the desert Most of India's renewable energy comes from massive solar farms in the deserts of Rajasthan or Gujarat.
"India is making huge progress in terms of deploying renewable energy, investment as well as capacity. In the financial year 2021-22, we saw a record of $14.5 billion investment in renewable energy alone," Garg tells NPR. "In addition, there were investments to developing the transmission and distribution infrastructure, modernization of the grid. Some amount of money even flowed to battery storage." Residential rooftop solar is still lagging behind, Garg says.
To try to boost it, the government has set up a new rooftop solar web portal, where anyone who wants to set up solar panels can register for government subsidies.
A new generation of solar evangelists in India A decade ago, Jay Vyas was an accountant in his 50s, working on a variety of projects, when a proposal for a rooftop solar installation came across his desk.
"Now, I'm passionate about looking into new things that might become commercially viable. So I thought, 'Why not?' and I started looking into it." In 2017, Vyas co-founded Koku Solar, a company that's since installed hundreds of small-scale solar projects on residential rooftops in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is the capital.
Onshoring supply chains for photovoltaic panels in India Vyas and Divekar used to import solar panels from Germany or Singapore.
That's set to change soon, with record investments from two of India's biggest conglomerates, the Adani Group and Reliance Industries, to onshore the entire solar panel supply chain.