Hope to bring down costs of home power systems: ISA Director General

The International Solar Alliance (ISA) will be looking to bring down the costs of comprehensive home lighting solutions according to Director General, Upendra Tripathy.

Speaking at the third RE-Invest conference, Tripathy said, “In the next 15 months, we are going to bring down the costs of home power systems. It is not just five LED bulbs, the system would have a solar refrigerator, radio, and a fan among others in different climates. We are hoping for an experience similar to solar pumps, where the ISA tenders brought down the price by 40 per cent.”

Tripathy said that the prices of solar pumps discovered through demand aggregation by Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL) for ISA are among the lowest ever. “Some countries are using that price for pumps as a benchmark and calling it the ISA price for solar pumps,” he said.

ISA has recently finalised a global price discovery tender for 22 member countries. Technology missions consisting of finance and technical experts were then sent to 9 countries, but the process was slowed down by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an earlier interview to BusinessLine , Tripathy said that ISA has been responsible to bring down cost through global bidding, the savings by member countries will be an indirect subsidy.

“In the next Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting, which will be COP 26 in Glasgow, we are planning to come out with a Glasgow charter. I hope it would cover the One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG) initiative, the World Solar Bank and the Green Grid Alliance,” he said.

Commenting how the OSOWOG would be functional, Tripathy said, “It will not be like a ring around the world. Instead it will be a scattered but coordinated electricity grid to ensure continuous solar energy supply to the world.”

The World Solar Bank will be a special finance mechanism tailored to the needs of ISA members in the solar space, including storage and solar vehicle segments.

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