India’s demand for solar energy is creating a market opportunity worth $20 billion annually, according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

At the inaugural session of the third RE-Invest conference, Modi said India should become a manufacturing hub for solar energy. He projected the demand for locally-produced panels to grow to 36 GW over three years.

Production linked incentives

“After the success of Production Linked Incentives (PLI) in electronics manufacturing, we have decided to give similar incentives to high efficiency solar modules. In a short time, many of our plans have become a reality. There has been an investment of over $64 billion in the last six years,” he said.

Modi said that ensuring ‘ease of doing business’ is our utmost priority and dedicated project development cells have been established to facilitate investors.

“There are huge renewable energy deployment plans for the next decade. These are likely to generate business prospects of the order of around $20 billion per year. I invite investors, developers and businesses to join India’s renewable energy journey,” he said.

“Today India’s renewable energy generation capacity is the fourth largest in the world. It is growing at the fastest speed among all major countries. The renewable capacity in India is currently 136 GW. This is about 36 per cent of our total capacity. But 2022, the share of renewable capacity will increase to over 220 GW,” Modi said.

“We have increased our installed renewable energy capacity by 2.5 times in the last six years. The installed solar energy capacity has increased 13 times. This is an outcome of our commitment to fighting climate change,” he added.

The inaugural session was also attended and addressed by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Representatives from the UK, Denmark, and Bhutan also shared their views on climate change mitigation and growing renewable energy deployment.

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