Rooftop solar has been growing at a significant pace in many countries worldwide
- Germany leads, with over a million rooftops sporting solar panels
- USA has over 6 GW of rooftop solar as of mid-2014
- Japan has an incredible 95% of their total 10 GW of solar in rooftops, so that would be a cool 9 GW
So, should not India join the race too? While India’s current rooftop solar installations are nothing to write home about, we at Solar Mango believe that the next few years could change all that.
Let us look what indeed could be realistic estimates for rooftop solar installations in India over the next few years.
According to 2011 census, India has 330 million houses; of these, 140 million houses have proper roof with concrete or asbestos.
- At even 1 kW per roof, that would be a total potential of 140 GW. Conservatively, we can consider 20% of the households to be the real customer, so we are talking about minimum 30 GW
- For commercial and industrial, Solar Mango estimates 50 GW as the minimum potential.
Thus, together, realistic rooftop solar potential for India would be in the 80-100 GW range.
Right now, it is a total of 0.3 GW. Thus, less than 0.5% of the potential has been achieved.
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In theory, it has the potential to grow 100-200 times!
But of course, not all this will happen soon.
The more relevant question is: What will indeed be the growth in the next few years, say by 2020?
Solar Mango undertook a small scenario analysis:
While trying to estimate growth, we looked at residential and industrial/commercial as two distinct segments, because the drivers and imperatives are different for these two.
- We expect industrial and commercial sector to grow much faster than the residential sector. It is quite possible that 5-7% of the total available rooftops could be solarized by 2020, so that would be about 3-4 GW from the industrial sector
- Residential will be much slower, we expect 1-2% of potential residences to be solarized by 2020, so that would be about 0.5 GW.
Together, we can expect 4-5 GW of rooftop solar in India by 2020, from about 0.3 GW right now.
That would be a 15 fold growth, or about 1500%. A number that should make quite a few entrepreneurs sit up and take note.
Useful links
Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) link on number of rooftops and rooftop solar potential
Want to know about installation of rooftop system.
What i feel it will be a very necessay items for the daily life very soon. Every day electricity consumption is growing up because of the style of living is growing high every day for the competion life for maintaining the social status and daily needs. So to meet up the electricity demand it will be dyre need of solar system in every house/ industries and commercial purpose.
Interested in solar power palnt, recently we have installed at our factory rooftop.
It is very wonderful site. Lot of efforts and technical data has been taken for development of this site. Thanks a lot . It is very helpful for quick references .