Leadership Talk series @IIML Noida campus 5th August'17

On 5th August'17(Saturday), the 31st LTS session was organised in a joint effort put up by the students of IIM, WMP (Working Managers Program) and PGPSM (Post Graduate Program – Sustainability Management) courses.

Honored guest and speaker for the session was Mr.  Dwipen Boruah, Managing Director, GSES India. Mr. Boruah is a passionate renewable energy professional with a vision to create sustainable change through quality education, engineering and leadership. His Specialties are renewable energy - engineering, consultancy, training & publications.

In the session, Mr. Dwipen shared his views about the growth, opportunity and challenges for solar power in India with respect to globalization all around the world. He also emphasized upon the key challenges and concerns related to the solar power plants implementation in India and also threw some light upon the key drivers of solar market in India.

He shared that there has been a steep projection of growth rate of installed solar capacity from 2.12 megawatt in 2008-2009 to 12289 megawatt in the present year and the new target set by the government is of 100,000 megawatt solar energy generation by the year 2022. The proposed 100,000 capacity is split into two divisions i.e. 40,000 MW for solar rooftops and remaining for the various sectors such as Solar energy power corp. of India, Large power sectors, On-going programmes etc. [Source: MNRE]

Mr. Dwipen highlighted about the key drivers of solar market in India, some of the important ones being the Rapid decline in solar energy generation costs, favorable policy and regulator frameworks, Emergence of innovative business models and the energy security are under consideration by the Indian government. He also explained how generation cost trends of silicon PV cells have come down from 76$ in 1977 to 30 cents in the year 2015.

He also explained the concept of "net metering" which is a billing mechanism that credits solar energy system owners for the electricity they add to the grid. For example, if a customer has a PV system on the house’s rooftop, then it may generate more electricity than the energy requirement of home usage during daylight time. The additional energy generated is pushed back to grid and the customer is paid accordingly. The customer is billed on the net energy consumed.

He shared about the growth of various countries in solar sector with China taking the lead with the generation of 84.64 gigawatts and US being the next with the generation of 42.4 gigawatts of solar energy. India is currently at sixth position and working progressively to increase its capacity for the upcoming years. There is a great source of potential for the solar market in India. He affirmed that both Germany and India have taken the approach to prioritize the renewable resources in their nations.

Mr. Dwipen further elaborated on the challenges and concerns existing in the current scenario. He discussed that need of detailed technical evaluation of the project, as- most people directly start to build the project which is not the right approach and may turn into a complete failure as many aspects of rights requirements are ignored in the process. The other concerns he added were about the inadequate implementation of policy and regulations from the government agencies, and availability, reliability and strength of the grid. He explained that 55% of the projects failed mainly due to the installation faults and 25% due to the design-planning faults.

Mr. Boruah also upheld that many failures happen because of reasons such as inadequate knowledge and skill, poor site assessment, ignoring the critical issues such as drainage planning, and use of poor quality raw materials, irrelevant structure design of the plant, taking no precautions against the nature aggression, trying to save money on smaller things to cut costs, doing no proper testing of the set-up plant.

In concluding the session, he discussed about building the quality system with the help of four essential elements that are management standards covering hardware standards, practitioner standards and the training standards.