Reenergizing India’s solar energy market through financing
The Indian solar industry has been maturing at a rapid clip, growing more than a hundredfold in four years to reach over 2.6 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity in 2014. Coupled with successful state-level policies in Gujarat and Rajasthan, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (Mission or NSM) has played a pivotal role in making the industry successful. Abundant policy instruments, such as feed-in tariffs (FiTs) and accelerated depreciation (AD), have been deployed at the state and national levels. These instruments have been vital to the rapid scale-up achieved by this industry so far and are now ready for adoption on a wider scale. Further, India’s new government has announced nationwide targets to harness solar power and enable every Indian home to run at least one light bulb by the year 2019.