Soon, subsidy for solar power generators for homes

An easy option to escape from hackles of rising power bills is in the offing. The Union government will provide 30% subsidy for installing home solar power generation systems.

Updated on: Oct 31, 2012, 01:46:42 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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An easy option to escape from hackles of rising power bills is in the offing. The Union government will provide 30% subsidy for installing home solar power generation systems.

The ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) will be soon ready with a new national scheme that will allow house or flat owners to install solar panels on rooftops.

This system will help them feed the power directly into the grid and keep bulky batteries at bay.

The new system envisages a metering system where in a household will get the power bill depending on the difference between the power consumed and generated by it.

For instance, if a solar panel generates around 400 units a month and a household consumes the same number of units, the net bill would be zero.

In case, your solar panel generates more units than that you have consumed, money for the extra units will be credited to your account.

"The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) is finalising the technical standards for connectivity to enable power distribution companies to provide the service to consumers," said MNRE secretary Gireesh Pradhan.

The discoms will have to take solar generated power from consumers as the rules require them to avail of electricity from renewable sources. In addition, a ministry source said, the companies will not be able to refuse solar power from its consumers.

Around 63% of homes in Germany have grid-linked solar power systems on their home rooftops. It happened because the German government initiated the scheme with the feed in tariff for solar energy being higher than the rate for the power consumed.

After the scheme took off, the German government had gradually reduced the feed in tariff to make it comparable with electricity price.

A ministry official said India has opted for feed in tariff as the power tariff is bound to rise. A roof-top solar system runs for around 25 years.

The government has decided to provide the subsidy on capital cost since discoms' attempts to make consumers install solar systems have failed, because of their higher price.

"State government agencies will disburse the subsidy component for installing the system," an official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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