Make Installation Of Solar PV Rooftops For Houses Mandatory: Centre for Science and Environment

New CSE analysis finds solar PV rooftop power tariff is half the cost of power generated by DG sets

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has urged to make installation of solar PV rooftops mandatory for all upcoming residential societies. The CSE has also sought a ban on use of diesel generator sets in highly-polluted urban areas like the national capital.

The environmental watchdog said that decline in cost of solar panels means they are now a financially viable option and the cost of power generation from a DG set, including the capital cost, is Rs 27 to Rs 33 per unit – compared to rooftop solar tariff of less than Rs 10 per unit.

The solar rooftop can also reduce monthly power bill of the consumers. According to CSE the extra units generated through solar rooftop can be exported to the grid, something which cannot be done with DGs.

In a survey conducted in five residential societies across Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan it was found that “size of the diesel generator was often not connected to outage” but was sometimes linked to the “status” of a particular society.

For instance, ICON, an upscale society in Gurugram, which experiences an outage of only 16 minutes per day on an average had “full backup” with DG size of 1,112 KW.

“DG back-up has become increasingly redundant because of reducing power outages in cities. We must realise that full back up was considered a basic need by upscale societies when the outages often lasted several hours a day,” said Chandra Bhushan, director general, CSE during the launch of report ‘Solar Rooftop: Replacing Diesel Generators in Residential Societies’.

“If power outage is less than an hour a day then the very definition of ‘full back-up’ needs to be changed. For tens of minutes of outage, even for the high-end societies ‘partial load back-up’ should be sufficient,” Bhushan added.

CSE researchers have estimated that up to 3 GW of solar rooftop can be installed on new residential societies over the next five-seven years. This segment can, therefore, be a key to reaching the government’s ambitious target of 40 GW solar PV rooftops to be achieved by 2022.

As per CSE, this partial load can be easily met by solar rooftop for individual flats. DG sets though can be used to supplement additional power requirements for shared facilities in a residential society like elevators and for energy-intensive appliances such as ACs.

With PTI Inputs