Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM)

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, also known as National Solar Mission, is one of the eight key National Missions which comprise India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC). It was officially launched on January 11, 2010.

• The Mission has set the ambitious target of deploying 20,000 MW of grid connected solar power by 2022, which was revised to 1,00,000 MW by 2022 during June 2015.

Achievements

• Among the key achievements of the first two phases was establishing reverse bidding as the market-oriented procurement mechanism as against the practice of feed-in tariff and capital subsidies (which covers a share of the upfront cost of installing something like a solar water heater or domestic solar power plant). This resulted in substantial reduction of solar electricity supply prices.
• the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) was established as a major procurement agency to reduce the risks for solar power producers. Another achievement was the creation of larger projects to further bring down the capital investments in solar power generation projects through the development of integrated solar parks that provided integrated infrastructure for solar power plants.
• Apart from this, a Renewable Energy Corridor was also launched to develop a dedicated transmission grid for areas with abundance of sunlight or wind to create solar and wind energy. Solar radiation monitoring stations were also set up across India.
• a capacity of 12.87 GW of solar power was added till November 30, 2017.
• bulk procurement of solar panels through EESL (Energy Efficiency Services Ltd) for applications such as solar irrigation pump sets has further reduced the procurement prices of solar modules.

Challenges

• The huge funding required for generation of such huge amount of power generation which is the major concern for the government.
• Also, the high capital investment requirements, including securing the panels to the roof, the maintenance that is required for the panels as well as the fact that rooftop solar installations may not really be that cost effective (without subsidy as in USA and Australia).

Ways to Improve

• a lot needs to be done to improve domestic manufacturing and develop a competitive industry with qualified manpower. Further, the solar rooftop programme needs to strengthen and more market innovations are required so that a large market for distributed solar power can be developed in a short time.