Wednesday, September 25, 2013: Recently at Renewable Energy India conference, Tobias Engelmeier, Managing Director of market analyst firm, Bridge to India batted for tapping the vast potential solar power has to offer for a city like Delhi.
“We said that you could install quite easily over the next five years as much as 2 GW of solar power and that would cover just under 20 per cent of Delhi’s power needs at that point in time and would require under 5 per cent of the available rooftop area,” he said pointing to the scale of opportunity, PV magazine reported. He referred to a report Bridge to India meant for Greenpeace’s campaign ‘Switch on the Sun’ for this summer.
“The key message here is that we can start thinking in a different dimension when talking about solar power,” he added.
Government buildings accounts for 13 per cent of the available rooftop area in the city of Delhi, while commercial rooftop accounts for over ten per cent of the area. Major share in this area belongs to residential rooftop accounting for nearly 50 per cent or possibly 1,243 MW of solar PV. Residential rooftops are basically smaller in size leading to increase in cost of solar installation in this particular market segment.
However, Delhi provides many government-owned rooftop to initiate with subsidy-free rollout of solar power.