Energetica India 89 - May 2020

SOLAR POWER Rooftop Solar potential in MSME sector Rooftop solar in sectors such as residential, PSU and large C&I have their own unique incentives to adopt rooftop solar. However, for the MSME segment, the situation is different and difficult, though the potential is substantial. This article is a part of the study “Identifying barriers for roof- top solar uptake in MSMEs and development of a mitigating financial framework” was carried out as part of the SUPRABHA – SBI - The World Bank – MNRE Grid connected rooftop solar PV (GRPV) - technical assistance program. The report was pre - pared over a period of six months through extensive consulta- tions with a wide spectrum of stakeholders. The starting point of this study was to estimate the rooftop so - lar potential of the MSME segment. For that, the study used a two-pronged approach - a top down approach, which takes the overall industrial power demand as a starting point and cal - culates proportionate MSME consumption, and a bottom up approach, which considers aggregating the power demand of MSME clusters in India. The rooftop solar potential in MSMEs has been estimated after taking a few assumptions regarding the percentage of the power demand that rooftop solar is likely to meet. Both these approaches point to a huge potential of ~16 GW-18 GW of rooftop solar in MSMEs. This potential, if unlocked, can go a long way in meeting the government’s target of 40 GW rooftop solar by 2022. However, despite this huge potential, the rooftop solar sector as a whole, and especially in the case of MSMEs hasn’t taken off as planned. The key reasons for the non-offtake of rooftop solar in MSMEs are financial barriers and operational barriers Top-Down Approach / Bottom-Up Approach The top-down approach involves estimating the MSME energy consumption by firstly looking at the totalenergy consumption of industrial consumers in thecountry, estimating the percent - age demand of MSMEsout of the total industrial demand and finally arrivingat the rooftop potential for MSMEs, based on the - assumptions related to MSMEs meeting a portion oftheir ener- gy demands through rooftop solar, as shownin Table 1. The bottom-up approach involves looking at energyrequire- ments of the various MSME clusters in India byestimating the average size of each industrial cluster,the energy profile (ener - gy intensity) of each clusterand the number of clusters, which again gives us the rooftop potential in MSMEs. 39 energetica INDIA- May_2020 Report by Suprabha and E&Y Figure 1. Approach for computation of rooftop potential available in MSMEs in India