In Solar Power, India Begins Living Up to Its Own Ambitions

The following was gleaned from an article with the above title in the December 29, 2011 New York Times.

I like this article, in part, because it provides cost data which are lacking in so many Renewable Energy articles.  Even though costs are stated in Indian rupees, conversions are provided.

For reference, a good, round, average "rule of thumb" cost for electricity in the United States is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.  In the U.S., we burn a lot of coal and coal is cheap.

In Solar Power, India Begins Living Up to Its Own Ambitions

KHADODA, India — Solar power is a clean energy source. But in this arid part of northwest India it can also be a dusty one.

Every five days or so, field hands with long-handled dust mops wipe down each of the 36,000 solar panels at a 63-acre installation operated by Azure Power.

Two years ago, Indian policy makers said that by the year 2020 they would drastically increase the nation’s use of solar power from virtually nothing to 20,000 megawatts — enough electricity to power the equivalent of up to 15 million modern American homes during daylight hours when the panels are at their most productive.

Dozens of developers like Azure, because of aggressive government subsidies and a large drop in the global price of solar panels, are covering India’s northwestern plains with gleaming solar panels. So far, India uses only about 140 megawatts, including 10 megawatts used by the Azure installation, which can provide enough power to serve a town of 50,000 people, according to the company.

“Prices came down and suddenly things were possible that didn’t seem possible,” said Tobias Engelmeier, managing director of Bridge to India, a research and consulting firm based in New Delhi. Chinese manufacturers like Suntech Power and Yingli Green Energy helped drive the drop in solar panel costs. The firms increased production of the panels and cut costs this year by about 30 percent to 40 percent, to less than $1 a watt.

This month, the government held its second auction to determine the price at which its state-owned power trading company — NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam — would buy solar-generated electricity for the national grid. The average winning bid was 8.77 rupees (16.5 cents) per kilowatt-hour.

That is about twice the price of coal-generated power, but it was about 27 percent lower than the winning bids at the auction held a year ago. Germany, the world’s biggest solar-power user, pays about 17.94 euro cents (23 American cents) per kilowatt-hour.

India still significantly lags behind European countries in the use of solar. Germany, for example, had 17,000 megawatts of solar power capacity at the end of 2010. But India, which gets more than 300 days of sunlight a year, is a more suitable place to generate solar power

Most Indian power plants are fueled by coal and generate electricity at about 4 rupees (7.5 cents) per kilowatt-hour — less than half of solar’s cost now. In this month’s auction, the recent winning bids were comparable to what India’s industrial and commercial users pay for electricity — from 8 to 10 rupees. And solar’s costs are competitive with power plants and back-up generators that burn petroleum-based fuels, whose electricity costs about 10 rupees per kilowatt-hour.

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