Energetica India nº91 July August 2020

posing 2 duties concurrently on one segment of the ecosys- tem would be unfair and not in line with the government’s am- bitious plan of 100 GW of solar by 2022. Having said that, if BCD is imposed anyway and the domestic manufacturing capacity doesn’t come up in line with the de- mand, then it would lead to either a steep increase in tariffs or under subscription of bids. Vikas Jain, Insolation Energy The safeguard duty on imports of solar cells and modules from China and Malaysia was announced in July 2018 to protect domestic cell and module manufacturers. It was set at 25 per cent for the first year, followed by a phased down approach for the second year, with the rate reduced by 5 per cent every six months until it ended on July 2020. However, this failed to achieve the desired results as no big manufacturing units were set up in India. The imports from China still accounts for 80% of the modules used in India. The proposal on BCD is being considered to prevent unre- stricted imports of solar gear from China. Safeguard Duty is actually a short time measure to provide relief to domestic in- dustry and is country specific whereas BCD is for long term and is not country specific. With the BCD and Safeguard Duty in place the domestic manufacturing is expected to take off in a big way. What do you think policy makers should do to tackle the situation? P. Vinay Kumar, Varp Power Simple, Give us certainty in taxation. One year visibility in tax- ation for a 25 year PPA structure does not go together. Sanjeev Aggarwal, Amplus Solar Policy makers need to look at increasing domestic capability in solar and renewable manufacturing while also keeping the final energy tariff viable. Direct incentives and benefits to high quality domestic manufacturers will be helpful in achieving this. Manoj Gupta, Fortum India Pvt Ltd In current situation, if government will provide grandfathering approach for upcoming projects as well, it will be helpful for the industry, or if agencies like SECI, NTPC will come up with a formula for compensation like earlier, which will be tackled without going to the regulator or court then it will be a suc- cessful formula otherwise it will completely hamper the future growth of the solar industry. Anil Joshi, Unicorn India Ventures The objective of policy maker is clear i.e. to promote domestic production and help utilizing existing capacity. Hence it would be important to understand how the cost of production can be reduced at the same time high quality solar equipments are manufactured. The policy maker may want to support on build- ing better research facility enabling production of high yield solar equipment, if India is able to produce high yield equip- ment then increase in cost can be compensated for better pro- ductivity and over a period of time the production optimization can be achieved. In mean time the policy maker may support with better PPA to compensate on increase in cost due to duty or raw material cost to make projects commercially viable. K. R. Harinarayan, U-Solar Clean Energy Policy makers should consider that domestic made modules are not able to meet the complete demand of all projects in the country. Few suggestions would be: 1. To phase out the injec- tion of domestic solar equipment so that manufacturers and developers can meet the competitive price as well as the large demand through tenders. 2. Provide incentive to Indian cell manufacturers to increase their production and support their supply of raw material that is not available in India currently. 3. Plan the self-sufficient market over a course of 4-5 years so that the market can make this transition organically without severely affecting the health of the market. Shri Prakash Rai, Amp Energy India Policy uncertainties and trade barriers in a growing segment tend to affect the sector adversely. We understand that the in- tent of the government is to scale up domestic manufacturing and provide a level playing field to the domestic manufactur - ers but that should not prove detrimental to the other segments in the ecosystem. Instead of imposing trade barriers, the gov- ernment should focus on reducing the cost of domestic man- ufacturing of modules and cells with cost subsidies, interest FEATURE STORY 29 energetica INDIA- July-Aug_2020 K. R. Harinarayan Founder and CEO, U-Solar Clean Energy Shri Prakash Rai Head C&I Business, Amp Energy India