Waiting for the solar boom

Waiting for the solar boom
Pratap Raju, Joint Managing Director, PR Clean Energy, talks about India’s renewable energy, and how it’s going to shape the power industry
Twelve years back, two brothers named Pramod Raju and Pratap Raju came to India from the Unites States. After forays into corporate finance and advisory (and even briefly in Bollywood), they found a niche in India’s booming renewable energy, sometime around 2009. It was a young space, made for new entrepreneurs.
First steps in solarIn 2009, solar was still nascent and prohibitively expensive. In fact, they were not even sure that there was huge potential in solar. They first began in wind energy and helped commission 59 MW of wind farms for two clients in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.
In 2011, surprised by quick drop in prices, they partnered with Fonroche Energie, the largest private developer of solar PV in France, and waited for the next tender. It came one month later—the RfS for the big NVVN tender, batch II opened. They bid. They won their first project of 20 MW.
About 12 months later, though it was their first solar project in India, they were the first to commission a solar project in the entire batch on December 23, 2012. With Fonroche’s technical team and expertise and a strong construction partner in Mahindra EPC, the construction took only 5 months.
When will the solar boom happen?The solar PV industry is changing fast, maybe faster. The government tenders, over the next 3 years, are in the thousands of MWs, but some state governments are still struggling to make them work. With rising diesel prices, solar does seem like the panacea to the power problem.
Solar PV is expensive (about Rs. 7-9 per kWh) though becoming less and less every year. So when will it transform India? Many people say grid parity, i.e. when solar PV costs a client the same as drawing power from the grid. It seems logical, even intuitive. How could a client refuse solar power when it does not cost him more than the grid? This moment of grid parity could happen anytime between 2016 and 2022.
The entrepreneur brothers believe that the real boom will be sooner if one looks at the right benchmark—opportunity cost, i.e. what people give up or gain while choosing solar.

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