IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308 _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Volume: 05 Issue: 07 | Jul-2016, Available @ http://ijret.esatjournals.org 512 SOLAR ENERGY INSTALLATION AND TARIFF OPTIONS IN INDIA: CENTRAL VS STATE GOVERNMENT Gaurav Gupta 1 , G. D. Agrawal 2 1 B Tech Electrical Engineering, M Tech II nd year Renewable Energy, CEE Department, MNIT Jaipur. 2 Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, MNIT Jaipur, Abstract India has a huge potential of solar energy, which can fulfill the gap of electricity demand and supply of the country. Presently harnessing the solar energy through solar PV technology is more popular than solar thermal technology in India because of easier installation and less maintenance. As solar PV technology is expensive and under developed, it requires special support by the administration body or government through its dedicated policies intending to promote it. Similarly in India also there are various schemes launched by government to promote solar energy installation and these can be divided in two parts under central government and under state government. Each of them has their own targets, policy, action plan and their installations. This paper describes and analyses the progress of both schemes (Central and State government) for solar installation in a comparative manner, and also find the required changes in policy for improvement. This paper also describes various tariff schemes adopted by the government (Central and State) like reverse bidding, FIT etc. and installations under them, again in comparative manner, also shows the best tariff option. Ultimately this paper figures out the loose points of solar policies in India, and suggests the improvement options in the policy side including better tariff scheme. ---------------------------------------------------------------------***--------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. INTRODUCTION India is solar rich country as of its geographical location. India has a potential of producing 5000 trillion units (kWh)[1] of clean energy. If we talk about the government solar policies in India it can be divided broadly in two types, first is central government solar policy, second is state nodal agency’s solar policies under control of their respective state governments. Solar installation development in India started rapidly after launching the Indian NAPCC plan on June 30, 2008. In this there 8 national missions were launched, in which Jawahar Lal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM)[1] also launched in year 2010, to harness India’s solar power. It is a fully central government owned scheme in which certain states were chosen for establishing the solar power plants but funding and all operational mechanism was under control of central government. On the other hand individual state like Gujarat was the first state to start its own solar policy to develop on grid MW scale solar power plants. After that, some other states also came with their state solar policy for adding solar capacity parallelly, which were Karnataka (Feb – 2011) and Rajasthan (April – 2011). The solar installation growth from year 2010 march 2014 is shown in figure 1, which also describes the breakups for various responsible policies. Fig 1: Solar Installation timeline in India (policy wise)