The National Solar Mission is an initiative of the Government of India and State Governments to promote solar power. The mission is one of the several policies of the National Action Plan on Climate Change. The program was inaugurated as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on 11 January 2010 with a target of 20 GW by 2022. This was later increased to 100 GW by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2015 Union budget of India. India increased its utility solar power generation capacity by nearly 5 times from 2,650 MW on 26 May 2014 to 12,288.83 MW on 31 March 2017. The country added 9,362.65 MW in 2017–18, the highest of any year. The original target of 20 GW was surpassed in 2018 (counting only utility installed capacity), four years ahead of the 2022 deadline.
India had a total rooftop solar installed capacity of 6.1 GW as of 30 June 2021.
Objective
The objective of the National Solar Mission is to establish India as a global leader in solar energy, by creating the policy conditions for its diffusion across the country as quickly as possible. Under the original plan, the Government aimed to achieve a total installed solar capacity of 20 GW by 2022. This was proposed to be achieved in three phase. The first phase comprised the period from 2010 to 2013, the first year of the 12th five-year plan. The second phase extended up to 2017, while the third phase would have been the 13th five-year plan (2017–22). Targets were set as 1.4 GW in the first phase, 11–15 GW by the end of the second phase and 22 GW by the end of the third phase in 2022.
The Government revised the target from 20 GW to 100 GW on 1 July 2015. To reach 100 GW by 2022, the yearly targets from 2015 to 2016 onwards were also revised upwards. India had an installed solar capacity of 161 MW on 31 March 2010, about 2 and half months after the mission was launched on 11 January. By 31 March 2015, three months before the targets were revised, India had achieved an installed solar capacity of 3,744 MW.
Year-wise targets
To meet the scaled up target of 100,000 MW, MNRE has proposed to achieve it through 60 GW of large and medium scale solar projects, and 40 GW through rooftop solar projects.
Growth of utilities installed solar capacity
The following table records the growth of the utilities installed solar capacity in India for every year of the National Solar Mission. All capacities are as on 31 March of the listed year.
Rooftop solar capacity
India had a total rooftop solar installed capacity of 6.1 GW as of 30 June 2021. The country added 862 MW of rooftop solar capacity during the first half of 2021, recording a 210% increase over the same period in 2020.
Phase 1 (2010–13) The first phase of this mission aims to commission 1000 MW of grid-connected solar power projects by 2013. The implementation of this phase is in hands of a subsidiary of National Thermal Power Corporation, the largest power producer in India. The subsidiary, NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam Ltd (NVVN), laid out guidelines for selection of developers for commissioning grid connected solar power projects in India. See JNNSM Phase 1 Guidelines. While NVVN is the public face of this phase, several other departments and ministries will play a significant role in formulating guidelines. NVVN will sign power purchase agreements with the developers. Since NVVN is not a utility, it will sell purchased power to different state utilities via separate agreements.
Technologies
For Phase 1 projects, NVVN started with a proposal for 50:50 allocation towards solar PV and solar thermal. The latter is quite ambitious given India has no operational solar thermal projects and less than 10MW of solar PV projects. While growing at a rapid pace lately, solar thermal technologies are still evolving globally. The first batch of projects allotted for Phase 1 included 150MW of Solar PV and 500MW of Solar Thermal. NVVN issued Request for Selection document outlining criteria for selection of projects under the Phase 1. See Solar Thermal RFS, Solar PV RfS
A growing solar PV industry in India is hoping to take off by supplying equipment to power project developers. Well known equipment manufacturers started increasing their presence in India and may give competition to local Indian manufacturers. Due to generally high temperatures in India, crystalline silicon-based products are not the most ideal ones. Thin film technologies like amorphous silicon, CIGS and CdTe could be more suitable for higher temperature situations.