Solar financing to accelerate adoption of residential rooftop solar in India

With the climate change happening all around us world leaders are all stepping up the gas on renewable energy and our own government has made ambitious commitments of 50% of our power coming from renewable energy by 2030. With the infinite supply of solar energy solar power has become the lead source for renewable energy for our country. Recent technology advancements coupled with the government policies has made sure that today solar power is easy to install on every rooftop in the country and every Indian citizen can play an important role in offsetting their carbon footprint. Over the last few years we have seen a lot of interest develop on rooftop solar power among the indian households but the adoption has been very slow. Against a target of 40 GW of rooftop solar we have only been able to install 4GW and approximately only 1GW has come from residential rooftop. A lot of people have been puzzled by this conundrum as today the government has taken aggressive steps to ensure that every Indian can set up a solar rooftop plant but yet there are few takers. There are many obstacles and challenges that come in the way and one of the primary areas identified as a key bottleneck is access to financing. The durable market many decades back went through the same learning curve and it is only when financing schemes were introduced by the different players that the durable markets exploded. Today more than 90% of everyday durables like cars/ 2 wheelers and even white goods like TV/ refrigerators/ washing machines are bought using easy financing schemes. Hence it is imperative that the government takes steps to facilitate launch of retail financing products for solar or ensure that the government banks make it easy to finance rooftop solar projects for the residential customers. This will usher in a new era of solar power adoption by every indian citizen having his own rooftop and soon India will be a world leader in driving adoption of solar power. Players like Solaron Homes Pvt Ltd have launched unique deferred financing schemes such as 0% interest free upto 12 months; 100% financing upto 5 years to facilitate adoption of rooftop solar power. We are hopeful that this will act as a signal for other players to enter the fray and ensure that the residential rooftop solar market also explodes like the durable market many decades back.