A new report of the India-focused, German-headquartered solar consultancy, Bridge-to-India, released today puts the total rooftop solar installations in India at 285 MW, a number that is veritably small compared with the potential of the market. The consultancy’s Founder and Director, Tobias Engelmeier, puts the potential “easily” at 100,000 MW.

Engelmeier estimates that the country will have 1,500 MW of rooftop plants by 2018, but many experts doubt it.

Pashupathy Gopalan, who heads the Asia-Pacific operations of the US-based solar major, SunEdison, notes that the rooftop game in India is quite different than in the West. SunEdison, incidentally, is the third largest player in the Indian rooftop market, with a share of 3.5 per cent.

Rooftops in India are not all available for solar; most of them are already in use in a variety of ways. You only have to look at the roof of a commercial building, such as a shopping complex. Much of the space is already taken up for outdoor air-conditioner units, water tanks or even cafeterias. Similarly, residential rooftops are used for drying clothes or partying – moonlight dinners are not uncommon. Then there is the question of avoiding shading. The place for a solar rooftop plant should be such that no shadow would fall on the panels for the next 25 years.

Commercial and residential establishments therefore generally either not have the space, or prefer not to freeze the space available for solar plants, says Pashupathy.

SunEdison and Azure Power won a mandate in Gujarat to put up 2.5 MW each of solar power plants on rooftops in the city of Gandhinagar. The companies had to lease residential rooftops, put up solar plants and sell the power to the state utility. Pashupathy says SunEdison found that people were not willing to give up their space for long number of years, though they were willing to consider signing for fewer years, say, five years.

The story is different when it comes to industries. Factories have large, flat roofs which are free for use, and there is practically no issue of shadows falling on them. Factory-owning companies are also amenable to long-term contracts.

In places like Tamil Nadu, (the state, incidentally, tops the list of rooftop installations in the country, with 50 MW), industries are in pressing need for energy security too.

Chennai-based Super Auto Forge, a Rs 400-crore auto components manufacturer, put up a 600 kW rooftop system a year ago. “Without it we would not have been able to run our factory,” says S Seetharaman, Chairman and Managing Director of the company.

Experts have also said that a good way to encourage residential rooftop solar plants is to give income tax breaks. When a company puts up a solar plant it gets the tax-saving ‘accelerated depreciation’ benefit, while an individual does not get anything, even though the economic activity is the same.

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