In a bid to push India’s energy transition toward renewable sources, the Union Cabinet allocated ?19,500 crores for the domestic manufacture of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules that could lead to savings of ?1.37 trillion in imports.
The Cabinet approved an additional Rs 19,500 crore of funding for the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for manufacturing of high – efficiency solar modules. The government expects this cash support to catalyse investment worth Rs 94,000 crore in a sector that’s highly dependent on imports, creating a domestic capacity of about 65 GW of fully and partially integrated solar photovoltaic modules.
The PLI encourages all the stages allocating Rs 12,000 crore for fully integrated polysilicon to wafer to cells to modules capacity, Rs 4,500 crore for three-stage integration of wafers to cells to modules, and Rs 3,000 crore for integration across cells and modules.
The combined module of renewable manufacturing capacity under both PLI tranches is expected to be 74 GW, in addition to 6 GW outside PLI schemes.
PIL will be disbursed for five years after the commissioning of solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing plants on sales of high-efficiency solar PV modules. The country will need 280-300 GW solar energy capacity to achieve the targeted 500 GW of renewable energy generation by 2030.