%0 Journal Article
%T Development of Solar Electricity Supply System in India: An Overview
%A Sandeep Kumar Gupta
%A Raghubir Singh Anand
%J Journal of Solar Energy
%D 2013
%I 
%R 10.1155/2013/632364
%X Solar electricity supply system has grown at very rapid pace in India during the last few years. A total of 1047.84£¿MW of grid connected photovoltaic projects and 160.8£¿MW of off-grid systems have been commissioned under different policy mechanisms between January 2010 and November 2012. It is observed that solar capacity development has achieved a greater height under state policies (689.81£¿MW) than others. A study is made in this paper of various national and state level schemes, incentives, packages, instruments, and different mechanisms to promote solar photovoltaics and its effectiveness. 1. Introduction The changing lifestyle with rapid industrialization has made electricity an indispensable and essential commodity over the years. During the last few decades, increasing prices of electricity with increasing demand and decreasing fossil fuel reserves have raised many concerns for policy makers, investors, and customers. Moreover, existing supply chain also poses a challenge of carbon foot print due to its dependency on fossil fuels like coal and oil for electricity generation [1¨C3]. To alleviate the concern, policy makers across the world have been looking for some sustainable and feasible alternative input energy sources for electricity generation. They found many options like nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, biomass, tidal, geothermal, and so forth [3, 4]. However, literature supports solar energy as it is the most ready and green option available across the world [5]. The report published by Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India (GoI) [6] states that The solar energy received by the earth is more than 15,000 times the world¡¯s commercial energy consumption and over 100 times the world¡¯s known coal, gas and oil reserves. And this energy is readily available during the day for anyone to tap and that too free and without any constraint. Initially used to supply electricity to satellites due to its high generation cost, solar technologies and its potential have improved enough to supply electricity not only to remote locations but also to supplement the national grid power at multimegawatt levels [7]. In India, wind- and solar-based systems have been getting good response under the conducive environment created through different policy measures. In this paper, our focus is only on the development of solar-based electricity supply systems. There are different kinds of support measures to promote grid connected and off-grid solar systems. We discuss these in detail in the subsequent sections. 2. India¡¯s
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jse/2013/632364/