Rising solar installations may pose a threat to the Utilities
China is set for a hard landing it seems
August 11, 2015Rooftop Solar power in India becomes economical and lucrative even without Capital subsidies
August 13, 2015Can Solar replace Utilities
Solar installations have been increasing at a massive pace. All the countries worldwide are resorting more and more to solar for their power needs. The US government has been punishing its coal industry and laying more emphasis on other cleaner renewable energy for generating power. Countries like China have also realized the importance of clean air and are increasing support to renewable power generation. India has set an ambitious target to achieve by 2022. All these activities around the globe have made one thing clear that the world is now acting upon to reduce pollution. These rising installations have now made utilities nervous and they have acted against this rising threat in different ways. For example, an Arizona utility had proposed a monthly $50 grid interconnection fee for consumers with solar installation. Utilities are also raising their voices against the customer friendly net metering policy. On the other hand, bigger installation companies in the US like SolarCity and SunPower are now trying to combine storage with their solar systems to make solar consumers independent or less dependent on the grid.
It is expected that in India itself, more than one fifth of the increase in electricity demand will be accounted by solar by 2022. That will be a huge achievement from the current status. The improvement in technology coupled with falling costs and attractive incentives worldwide have played a major role in making solar energy shine everywhere. About 1.2G W were installed in the US residential market in 2014 and 2015 has also been quite a good year for US residential market so far.
It will take some time for the trend to reach developing economies like India, but I think it has already started in some parts of the world. In India we are still waiting for the installation target to be achieved by 2022. But countries like US has been seeing an explosion in the solar installation market especially the residential segment and the installers are planning to introduce storage alongwith their solar system. This could be a major move against utilities, given the economic benefits of powering your homes with solar. Though the renewable sources of energy will not be able to displace the traditional grid in totality, but it will give a close competition to utilities. In any