Indian BIPV Report 2022: Status and Roadmap

SUPSI (The University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland) has published a research report entitled “Indian BIPV Report 2022: Status and Roadmap”. The National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE), under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), has assessed the solar photovoltaic potential of the country as about 748 GW.

India has been ranked 104th in the Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) and 98th in the average practical PV potential. However, the country has been ranked third in the Renewable Energy Country Attractive Index and first in Solar PV according to some reports. Yet the country’s solar power generation constitutes less than 4% of total value in contrast to 75% contribution from coal and gas, during the fiscal year 2019-20.

Even though there are conspicuous changes in PV development and its associated cost reduction in the past decade, their deployment is hindered by the limiting spatial availability and disadvantaged locations for grid-connected or Decentralized Distributed Generation (DDG) India has tremendous potential to harness solar radiation while considering its geographical advantage favoring more solar energy tapping.

The country’s solar potential is estimated to be 5 quadrillion kWh per year, with an average GHI of 5.1 kWh/m2 per day and an average of 2,300-3,200 sun hours. The PV seasonality index (Ratio between the highest and the lowest of monthly long-term PV output averages) is 1.75 across India, advocating PV output reliability in Indian conditions.