Renewable energy in India. Barriers and challenges

Solar and Wind energy has been the fastest growing renewable energy sector in India. Energy is vital for the country’s growth and improving the life standard of its citizen. Renewable energy sources and technologies have potential to provide solutions to the long-standing energy problems being faced by the developing countries. To meet the energy requirement for such a fast-growing economy, India will require an assured supply of 3–4 times more energy than the total energy consumed today. Due to greenhouse gases from combustion of fossil fuels renewable energy is one of the options to meet the energy growing demand in India. So far Indian renewable energy account for about 33% of primary energy consumptions. Indeed, India is the only country in the world to have an exclusive ministry for renewable energy development, the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy sources. In India, from the last three decades there has been a vigorous pursuit of activities relating to research, development, demonstration, production and application of a variety of renewable energy technologies for use in different sectors, and Indian policy makers doing their job in promoting renewable energy production by providing attractive policies to attract energy investors to invest in renewable sources. In this path Government of India revised an ambitious target of 175GW by 2022. However solar and wind industry faces a significant level of challenges in the areas of grid connectivity and evacuation infrastructure, lack of innovative models, creating awareness and solving political issues like land, authority etc. In this paper efforts have been made to analyse the evolution of policies in solar and wind power sector and discusses how to overcome the barriers and challenges of wind and solar power sector to achieve the ambitious target. And, this paper assesses by addressing existing barriers and challenges to achieve the objective of industrialization through clean energy.