Sunny side down: The many gaps in India’s solar story

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: When Bell Laboratories developed the first silicon solar cell in 1954, a technological breakthrough that converted sunlight into electricity, the invention made headlines. “It may mark the beginning of a new era," went a story in The New York Times, “leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harnessing of the almost limitless energies of the sun." That hope was born out of a humbling statistic: the amount of sunlight that strikes the earth’s surface in an hour and a half is enough to meet the world’s energy demand for a year.

Over the next several decades, solar technologies made huge progress, to the point that by 2020, solar electricity turned cheaper compared to polluting sources of energy like coal and fossil fuels. In November last year, India achieved a major milestone when its renewable energy capacity surged past 200 gigawatts (GW). By 2030, it hopes to scale up renewables to 500 GW.

India’s renewable energy targets are also critical to its stated goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2070. Data from the Central Electricity Authority show that by end-January 2025, renewables comprised 45% of installed power capacity. Solar capacity crossed 100 GW and now accounts for over a fifth of India’s installed power capacity.

Considering that solar was a paltry 3.7 GW in March 2015, the sector witnessed a remarkable 27-fold growth in less than a decade. In 2023, India spent $30 billion on green capital expenditure, which is expected to grow to more than $400 billion cumulatively in the decade spanning 2022-32, as per a Morgan Stanley report (April 2024). It now costs electricity distribution companies (discoms) anywhere between