People are going overboard over the announcement by the Finance Minister in her budget speech that one crore households will be provided with 300 units of free electricity per month through installation of roof top grid connected solar panels. Not only have the media gone ga ga over this announcement but even seasoned climate researchers like Ashish Kothari and Anjal Prakash have publicly praised this on LinkedIn.
Let us do a back of the envelope calculation to see how much truth there is in this grandiose announcement. The average power per day over the year produced from 1 KW of solar panels in India is about 4 units of electricity at the best given the lower output due to fog in winter and extensive cloud cover during monsoons. Thus, to provide 300 units of electricity per month or 10 units per day to a household through rooftop solar panels, a plant of 2.5 KW capacity will have to be installed. The overall cost of this including Tier 1 quality panels, supporting structure, cables, inverter and meters will be Rs 2.5 lakhs. Therefore, to provide one crore households with free rooftop solar electricity of 300 units per month the investment required is Rs 2.5 lakh crores. Whereas the provision in the budget is only Rs 10,000 crores overall solar installation not just roof top. The claim made in the budget is thus blatantly false as even if we assume that all of this paltry allocation is for roof top solar, the number of households covered will be only 4 lakh at the best!!
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