In March 2013, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) announced that the total solar PV module manufacturing capacity in India touched 2000 MW. While the 2GW landmark appears to be significant, it pales in comparison to the production capacity in China. According to IHS, the world’s top PV supplier in 2012, Yingli of China, alone shipped 2300 MW of PV modules.
Recently, I wrote an article for Intersolar India about the status of Solar PV Manufacturing in India.The impact of the domestic content requirement in the JNNSM on the Batch 1 and Batch 2 of the JNNSM is examined and the skew towards imported thin films is highlighted. The article looks at some of the hot button issues like Domestic Content Requirement, Anti-Dumping Investigations against imported modules and the issue of trade protectionism across the globe. Some of the structural challenges faced by the Indian manufacturers are also briefly highlighted.
The article can be read here.
I also had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Dr. Juzer Vazi, India Research Thrust Leader, SERIIUS (Solar Energy Research Institute for India and the USA). SERIIUS is one of three Joint Clean Energy R&D Centers (JCERDC) set up as a part of the US-India “Partnership to Advance Clean Energy” (PACE) launched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama. To learn more about the activities of SERIIUS, you can read the interview here.
Do let me know any feedback you may have.
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India manufacturing needs to focus on developing solar PV system for the masses by reducing the prices and doing R&D for developing standised system to market in other developing markets like africa, south east asia, countries in gulf, south american countries where tribal and poor people still don’t have electricity their is wide market waiting to be tapped in offgrid projects. since due to size of production capacity china has reached its difficult for Indian companies to match them or provide such prices henc innovation and R&D is the key to fight the Chinese invasion and find new markets. Also a ecosystem of maintenance of such offgrid also need to built for providing maintenance services along ith spare parts similar to what has happened in mobile phone market in rural and urban India this will not help in spread of solar products across India but also create employment in rural India. Regulatory and Technical bodies need to standardized the system to reduce cost and provide technical parameters for the same. BEE can provide star rating for such devises also to make them energy efficient as well.
Solar module manufacturing capacity 2000 MW is not sufficient looking to the PV potential in the country like India. In forthcoming years, the rising trend of increasing solar PV, present manufacturing capacity 2000 MW is less. India should manufacture for own requirement as well as for exporting in international market.