Plans to reduce the unit cost of electricity offered to rooftop solar power will have a severe negative impact on the industry as well as the national economy, the Solar Industries Association (SIA) said at a press conference yesterday in Colombo.
An immediate stand-still of the industry with a large number of job losses will occur resulting in major barriers for achieving the Government’s policy of 80% renewables by 2030. “We have reasons to believe that a conspiracy is been attempted to disrupt the local entrepreneurship in the solar industry and to change the government policy in a subtle way,” Secretary, SIA, Lakmal Fernando said.
Currently 25,000 solar systems supply 270 MW to the National Grid. In order to achieve the government policy, at least 200,000 rooftop power plants should be built to add 2 GW within the next few years to support the target and add another 3 GW of power through ground mounted solar power plants.
“Our main aim is to increase the solar powered energy to 5 GW by 2030 from the current value of 320 MW,” he added. However only 270 MW of roof-mounted solar systems and 62 MW of ground-mounted solar systems have been added to the national grid since 2016. Thus the capacity addition to the grid from solar power should be increased to 200 MW annually from 2021 in order to meet the target set for 2030.
President, SIA, Kushan Jayasuriya said that the country is not fully utilizing the available opportunities to achieve the targets for solar energy. He points out that the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is losing the opportunity to generate low cost energy from 2 GW solar rooftop plants in next 20 years due to the heavy reliance on fossil fuel based plants.
“The impact is not only on the CEB but on the entire economy,” Jayasuriya said. It should be emphasized that the protection and promotion of the solar power industry will save the country an extensive amount of foreign exchange. This also turns a consumer to a Prosumer (producer/consumer) which would benefit the country as well as the general public while promoting renewable energy.
The solar rooftop industry has created about 25,000 local entrepreneurs and has created over 10,000 job opportunities. An economic development of over 40 billion rupees was achieved. As at 2020 the cost per kW of rooftop solar stands at 19.80 rupees and ground mounted solar at 19.56 rupees which is far more less than the cost per kW of oil-fired power generation standing at 39.62 rupees and coal-fired power generation at 22.50 rupees.
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