Green energy to power over 50% homes in big cities

The Narendra Modi-led government has started work on a plan to ensure half of all homes in major cities receive some power from solar or wind energy sources by 2019.

Updated on: Jun 9, 2014, 24:28:02 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Narendra Modi-led government has started work on a plan to ensure half of all homes in major cities receive some power from solar or wind energy sources by 2019.

The plan includes fresh incentives to encourage companies and individuals to invest in renewable energy sources and setting up giant solar plants in states such as Rajasthan and Gujarat.

New plans for renewable energy are also in the pipeline for the Capital. Following a visit by a team to Gujarat — one of the top-performing states in green energy —Delhi government is looking at additional incentives to citizens for installing roof-top solar systems with grid connectivity.

The Centre plans a similar model for other cities, emulating Germany where half of the homes have roof-top solar power systems. India is the world’s third-largest solar energy generating country but gets enough sunshine to top the list.

At the national level, ministry officials said, people will have an option to sell the excess power to the electricity grid for which a policy initiative will be revived. “Some income every month will be an additional incentive for switching to green energy,” said an official at the ministry of new and renewable energy.

The decision to give a big push to renewable power sources was behind the Prime Minister’s decision to bring the ministries of conventional and renewable power under Piyush Goyal. Sources told HT that Modi asked Goyal to go big on renewable energy.

This is keeping in line with the progress made in generating green energy by Gujarat during Modi’s tenure as chief minister. Gujarat implemented the Jyotigram Yojana that provided 24/7 power to each household. The scheme depended on solar, wind, biomass and waste as energy sources to generate about 25,000 MW annually.

Goyal has promised to replicate this Yojana and was in the state to study Gandhinagar’s success story. After meeting the PM, lieutenant governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung also sent a team to study the Gujarat model this week that resulted in fresh power proposals for the Capital.

Gujarat initiated work on building the world’s biggest solar park of 4,000 MW spread over 20,000 hectares of salt land in Kutch. The state also installed solar panels over a water canal to ensure both power generation and saving water lost to evaporation. Previous governments have tried to popularise renewable energy with a subsidy scheme for installing solar installations including roof-top power standalone generation systems. But the schemes didn’t have desired impact as the required political push was absent.

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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