Solar Power Industry: Future in India

Solar Power Industry: Future in India

Introduction of On-going Research

Over a period of time, our dependence on energy based on fossil fuels is leading to their depletion. Thereby, there is an urgent need to move from the non-renewable energy sources to the non-depleting renewable energy sources to attain sustainable growth. In India, Solar Energy has a great potential as future energy resource having about 5000 trillion Kwh per year energy being incident over our country’s land with most parts receiving around 4-7 Kwh energy per sqm per day. Keeping this in view, Indian government came up with the national solar mission launched under brand name “Solar India” with a vision of making India’s economic development energy efficient.

Keeping the missions of solar India under view, various solar projects have been launched in India to meet the targets set by government under the project. Many major organizations such as Tata power, Lanco Group, BHEL etc are working on solar power plants. The base of these power plants are the Crystalline Silicon based photovoltaic solar cells. Various reputed organizations of India are involved in manufacturing these c-Si photovoltaics such as Bharat Electronics ltd, Central Electronics ltd, Indosolar ltd, Tata/BP Solar etc. The basic raw material for these photovoltaics is Silicon Wafers which constitutes of the major cost in a photovoltaic cell. It nearly constitutes of 45-50% of total cost of solar cell. In India, there is no manufacturing plant for development of silicon wafers, thereby it is completely imported. CEL, which is the first Indian organization in solar industry, has a plan to form a joint venture with BHEL to work on a project for production of silicon wafers. The estimated budget of the project is around INR 6000 crores.

Indian solar industry is in its development phase and it is facing a huge competition