Indian State of Haryana denies Solar Energy Connections for fear of Power Loss

The India distribution utilities which are mostly owned by the state governments have been pushing back against solar energy deployment particularly hard in recent times as the high penetration of solar power, especially distributed solar impacts their revenues and profits. Open access solar power which has a huge potential for development in India’s power sector is a sore point for the distribution utilities as they take away their most lucrative commercial and industrial consumers. Some states are trying to adversely change regulations for the rooftop solar power to make it unattractive for C&I consumers.

The industrialized states are pushing against the growth of solar power, despite the renewable energy ministry bringing in a new SRISTI scheme to incentivize distribution utilities in the states to promote rooftop solar energy instead of acting against it. As per the new scheme, rooftop solar above certain thresholds will lead to payment of large incentives for the distribution utilities. However, this has not changed the mindset of the babus of the discoms yet. These babus will lose power both literally and figuratively by allowing the open-access of solar.

Haryana state which has allowed 1000 MW of open access solar energy to be set up in the state is using red tape to stop the growth of open access solar. The distribution utility is not signing the final interconnectivity agreement with the solar developers to allow them to wheel power from their solar power plants to their customers with whom they have signed long term power purchase agreements. Note that open access solar power is very lucrative for both developers, as well as consumers since solar power can be generated, transported at a much cheaper cost for C&I consumers, compared to them buying the power from the distribution grid of the utilities. This can lead to savings of millions of dollars over the life of the contract and as a result lead to a loss of millions of dollars in losses for the state utilities. Besides this, the state government utilities are notoriously corrupt and they would be bargaining for massive bribes to sign these agreements as the developers do not have any choice as they are sitting on millions of dollars in investments that are leading huge amounts of money as interest every month.