It is no secret that despite the best efforts by the government, the rooftop solar PV segment in India has not really kicked off. The reason for this has been attributed to the lack of availability of net metering – a mechanism through which the excess electricity that is generated by a rooftop installation can [...]

Was doing some research on green buildings in Tamil Nadu and was surprised to find that the state is doing reasonably well. Why surprised? Let’s say it’s just the “familiarity breeds contempt” syndrome. Some updates on the status of green buildings in Tamil Nadu. You might be pleasantly surprised too, if you were from Tamil [...]

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities begins thus “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Dickens might have written something similar about the energy position in Tamil Nadu were he alive today. On the one hand, the state is the undisputed number one in wind in India (the state [...]

A tip from one of my colleagues at EAI (Nanda Kumar) got me to this site New Energy India. While the site appears to be in its early stages and is still evolving, what I liked most about the site were the statistics provided as a nice summary, on India’s position in the various aspects [...]

Loyalties die hard, don’t they. Eyebrows surely must have been raised when Manmohan Singh appointed the nuclear scientist Anil Kakodkar as the head of a renewable energy mission – and that too, the prestigious National Solar Mission. Nothing wrong with it perhaps from a capability/expertise point of view, just that it does jar a bit [...]

NTPC Limited – the largest power producer in the country with an installed capacity of over 36,000 MW has announced their intent to push through into the renewable energy segment with a 5 MW solar PV plant set to be comissioned close to the Port Blair airport in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The plant [...]

It is an open secret that the Tamil Nadu state electricity utilities are bankrupt. All right, perhaps they are not technically bankrupt, but for many private power producers, the difference does not matter. Ask especially wind power producers in Tamil Nadu who had not been paid for many months together! Recent announcements of power tariff [...]

When someone thinks about small hydro power in India, he or she thinks mainly about North East or Himachal Pradesh, or sometimes perhaps Karnataka. Tamil Nadu does not usually come to mind for small hydro, and perhaps with justification, because the state does not figure in the country in the top 5 when it comes [...]

Following the allegations from US about solar PV module dumping by Chinese and Vietnamese manufacturers, a new controversy has emerged. The Wind Tower Trade Coalition in the US has now accused Chinese companies of using unfair pricing methods a.k.a predatory pricing to undercut the competition significantly effectively ensuring that they almost wipe out the US [...]

The Indian government recently announced that they would take no actions on the cheap Chinese modules that are being dumped onto the Indian market. India is expected to have a bumper year in terms of solar installations with various state policies – notably Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh expected to add significant capacity over the [...]

Biomass is one of the renewable energy domains in which Tamil Nadu could have significant potential for progress in future. Estimates suggest only about 10% of the potential has so far been utilized. Of course, the lack of a robust supply chain that make create supply and price security is a problem as much in [...]

The buzz doing the rounds is that Tamil Nadu will soon be coming out with a comprehensive solar policy. Numbers such as 3000 MW by 2015 are doing the rounds, but there have been no concrete announcements as yet on solar power plant plans. However, some announcements have been made for solar street lights etc. [...]

The potential for off-grid solar is not only large, but is growing rapidly. The five major drivers that are influencing the growth of the off grid solar industry is elaborated in this  blog: Lagging grid growth The importance of grid growth as a driver for solar lighting demand varies by region, with rapid grid growth [...]

It is no secret that the explosive growth in the wind energy sector in India is chiefly attributed to the accelerated depreciation incentive that has been adopted. AD is a mechanism through which project developers can show that their asset has depreciated at a significantly faster rate over its life thereby reduce their tax liabilities. [...]

Over the course of 2011, investments in renewable energy rose by about 5% to $260 billion, up from $247 billion in 2010 and $186.5 billion in 2009, according to numbers released by BNEF. Investments in 2010 were largely driven by wind energy while 2011 clearly belonged to solar. New financial investment in solar peaked at [...]

The wind power is highly variable in nature. The unpredictable and infirm nature of wind energy poses a great challenge for the grid management. There are also other constraints such as availability of transmission infrastructure to evacuate the entire power generated by the wind energy promoters. Tamil Nadu government’s policy notes for 2012 indicates that [...]

With power deficit becoming a pressing problem, the Tamil Nadu state government is not surprisingly pushing through many thermal projects in the state. Here is a list of the prominent thermal projects in various stages of development: North Chennai Thermal Power Station- Stage-II is being expanded, with two units of 600 MW each expected to [...]

While an often cited reason for electric cars not being popular on today’s roads is that they simply do not have the range that a fossil fuel powered car has. A statistical analysis by two Columbia doctoral candidates investigating the travel preferences of 150,147 households gathered between March 2008 and May 2009 reveals that 95% [...]

Seems that our coal fired thermal power plants the lifeblood of Indian power sector, will no longer be able to supply power at the same old affordable price.  The sequence of events happening in the coal industry and its influence on the power sector in the past few months is a definite indication that the [...]

The past week saw various solar companies’ stocks soar. Companies all along the value chain – from poly to panel saw significant gains. The confidence in the solar companies was plain to see. Chinese solar companies though saw the largest gains (in terms of percentages) amongst the other companies of the world further reinforcing the [...]

The Power Ministry of India had recently announced that discussions are in the final stages for the setting up of 8 smart grid projects in the country. These pilot projects are estimated to be worth about Rs. 500 crores. With seminars and conferences related to smart grids around the corner, the announcement is as relevant [...]

As I had briefly mentioned in our solar manufacturing whitepaper, the solar PV panel manufacturing segment (to a large extent in China) is expected to consolidate over the coming years. China, which hosts a signifcant percent of the global manufacturers (over 500) is set to see the number of manufacturers reduce to less than 20 [...]

Energy storage is the Holy Grail of renewable energy – a cost effective and scalable energy storage system has the potential to make renewable energy far less costly and far more baseload compatible. A recent announcement by a US company EOS Energy made (Startup Promises a Revolutionary Grid Battery) me sit up and take note. [...]

Now, this appears to be a seminar on a topic not often discussed in the country. We are all rather tired of the same stuff on solar and wind, so here’s something more exciting – smart grid. I have my reservations on discussing about smart grid for a country where 70,000 villages don’t even have [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, the green jobs in India is expected to grow at a hectic pace, by about 60%, according to some estimates. This should not exactly be a surprise; in fact, the only surprise should be “why just 60%?”, given that the green sector is young and employment in this sector currently has a [...]