Big Box Retailers to help generate solar energy to lighten up homes

A recent study in USA claims that the big Box retailers ( currently about 100,000 of them including the likes of Walmart, Costco) have the potential to provide power to 7 million homes. This can be achieved by installing solar panels on the roof tops of such big box retailers. This is a gigantic yet important task. To solar panelise,  4.5 billion sqft. of  roof space in the USA, it may take a few years to accomplish. For big box retailers, the cost benefit arbitrage is about 15% and they can also make additional "non retail revenues" of 5-6% of their annual store sales. So, why arent they doing it or are they doing it but doing it slow. The answer lies somewhere in between. The cost of solar PV installation is high. Companies like Walmart have pledged that they will double their solar installations across their 680 stores by 2020. The good news is that the cost of solar PV installation is coming down substantially. With the new solar thermal units technology which will be used to heat water and conserve energy, the cost of solar paneling will come down further. In the USA alone it is expected that the big box retailers can save USD 8 billion annually. 

Now lets talk about India. With about 300 clear, sunny days in a year, India's theoretically calculated solar energy incidence on its land area alone, is about 5,000 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year (or 5 EWh/yr). The solar energy available in a year exceeds the possible energy output of all fossil fuel energy reserves in India. The daily average solar power plant generation capacity over India is 0.25 kWh per m2 of used land area, which is equivalent to about 1,500–2,000 peak (rated) capacity operating hours in a year with the availablecommercially-proven technologies. In a sunny country like India, this task of solar paneling can be accomplished earlier as we are still in the early stage of big boxing our retail. The standards must be set by the urban development bodies in India to encourage big box retailers to generate additional power for the region. This is a clear win win situation and can help lighten up our homes.

I hope the Solar Corporation of India, a public sector undertaking created by the Government of India is also thinking on same lines and we move forward to create a win win situation for both the big box retailers and the people of our country. Let there be light....and it better be solar.