Solar Rooftop Market Opportunity in India

Solar rooftop is going to play a pivotal role in India’s capacity addition through utilization of energy from sun. While the utility scale solar capacity addition saw a significant jump of ~ 5 GW when compared on y-o-y basis for CY 2020 and CY 2021, respectively. Overall solar capacity addition in India breached the 10 GW in CY 2021 wherein the utility scale addition stood at 8.3 GW and solar rooftop contributed to 1.7 GW. This growth in momentum of solar rooftop capacity addition was driven mostly by commercial and industrial players at large. 

It is, however, pertinent to note that despite the north-bound trajectory of overall costs in terms of installation which grew nearly 17%. This was on annual basis in CY 2021 when compared to CY 2020. The surge in costs are observed in Q1 2022 (CY) as well with close to 6% growth locked in cost when compared to Q4 2021 (CY). 

Despite, an increasing cost trend the rate of installations observed in last 4 quarters beginning CY 2021 has seen an addition in excess of 400 MW per quarter till Q1 2022. India has added 456 MW in January-March 2022 period which is close to 34% higher than the installations of 341 MW during the same period in 2021. 

The solar rooftop segment shall be crucial in India adding more RE capacities especially solar as it shall be a key resource driver with favorable Government policies & schemes.

What can lead solar rooftop be a game changer in decentralized energy solution in India and drive investments on a rapid pace? 

Solar rooftop hold immense potential in securing last mile green connectivity in India with possibly least impact upon grid stability. Most of the RTS developers and value chain providers are building fast paced solutions to tip the key bottlenecks of awareness among consumers and purchasing power parity in the event of lack of apt finances. In this milieu with correct measures by Government has enabled a right atmosphere for increased pace of RTS capacity additions in the country. Having said so the realization of the potential of RTS will take some on ground factual understanding for the developers to bridge the gap of capacity additions pace in the country. To RTS market in a regional dynamism exists wherein the market is flooded with small unorganized players who pose significant competition in certain end use category with repeat orders. 

Moreover, the regulatory & policy environment across the state’s (due to concurrent structure) does not hold similarity and has specifics to it w.r.t to development models of RTS whether on RESCO or CAPEX. Therefore, factoring this a holistic potential assessment of RTS potential is required with a split across the key industries and on a state-wide basis which shall make the approach to go-to-market (GTM) strategies for the market players an easy job. Keeping this in mind the domain specialists and market research experts at eninrac consulting thought to conduct a detailed “Voice of Consumer (VoC)” survey on pan India basis adapting a cluster-based approach for RTS uptake at an augmented pace in the country.