After you found out India’s impressive solar power figures, you might say that it’s easy for them to go that far: after all, fewer countries are sunnier than India. If most people usually take their best belongings for granted, India has sure done its homework lately: it was the most active solar power installer in 2011, standing for 4% of investments worldwide.
Last year they started by committing $10.3 billion to renewable energy, out of which almost half ($4.2 billion) to the solar sector alone. This triggered a whopping 700% growth as compared to 2010. More precisely, India spent all this money in 2.777 GW of solar power that is currently connected to the grid.
Even though solar was the star of the year, the wind industry wasn’t neglected either: a similar $4.6 billion went into 2.827 GW of wind power. This move earned India to the third place in the global top of countries installing renewable equipments.
Ashish Sethia, India research head at BNEF (Bloomberg New Energy Finance), explains India’s commitment on the matter through the desire to reach its targets. According to Sethia, federal and state governments need to make sure there is somebody to buy all that electricity, that the transmission lines and the grid are all ready to receive it and that the producers will be committed to the service by receiving their payment on time.
India’s ambition doesn’t stop here: it plans to own 20 GW of solar power by 2022 and is proud to announce that it will have surpassed its targets over the April 2007 – March 2012 period with almost 2 more GW.
[via Treehugger]
