The government has announced the setting up of a whopping $350 million (~₹22.4 billion) solar development fund to enable financing of solar projects in the country.

The announcement was made by Union Minister for Power and New & Renewable Energy, R.K. Singh at the International Solar Alliance (ISA) Forum. The forum was part of the World Future Energy Summit being held in Abu Dhabi.

Confident with the country’s growth trajectory in renewable energy capacity addition over the past few years, Singh said, “India has one of the fastest growing renewable energy plans in the world and would achieve 175 GW target of installed renewable energy capacity well before 2020”.

On the sidelines of the event, nine MoUs/LoIs were signed between bankers and the project developers. The companies are: Vyonarc Development Ltd., Greenko Solar, Gensol Group and SOLARIG from Spain, Shakti Pump, Refex Energy, Amplus Solar, Tata Power, Jakson Solar and Zodiac Energy.

During the session, YES Bank also committed to financing solar projects of over $5 billion. Both CLP and NTPC Limited announced forging partnership deal with the ISA and committed to make a voluntary contribution of $1 million each to the ISA fund corpus. IEA and GCF also announced entering into partnership with the ISA.

The interim director general of the ISA, Upendra Tripathy, said that under the ISA umbrella, over 100 projects will be signed by April 2018.

Mercom’s India Solar Project Tracker shows that approximately 19.5 GW of solar have been installed as of December 2017. Of this, more than 2.5 GW were installed before the current administration came into power. The remaining 17 GW of solar was installed in the last three years. Despite falling short of each year’s annual targets, installations levels have been impressive until now.

Solar accounted for 19.3 billion units of electricity generated in first eleven months of 2017, up from just 11.6 billion units of electricity generated in the entire 2016.

In November 2017, Mercom reported that ISA and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) signed a joint financial partnership declaration to deepen their cooperation in support of renewable energy.

Recently, ISA invited proposals from the governmental organizations of its member countries to develop rooftop solar projects at select buildings in their respective countries. These rooftop solar projects will be of maximum 1 MW capacity.

Image credit: @RajKSinghIndia