The Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission (KERC) has proposed to revise tariffs for solar power projects, including Solar Rooftop Photovoltaic (SRTPV) plants, by considering a revised capital cost. The commission will hold a public hearing to discuss this on Tuesday.
KERC’s public hearing notice says the revision of tariff will consider the safeguard duty and applicable GST, and the revised capital cost of ₹373.3 lakh against ₹314 lakh.
Explaining this, an official from the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (Bescom) said solar tariffs are determined year-on-year as the prices of solar panels fluctuate in the international market.
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The KERC had last year made known its intention to boost solar energy input in the State by encouraging more people to install solar rooftop plants due to the poor response from domestic consumers.
Solar power installed
As on December 31, 2018, the KERC noted that the State had installed solar power generation capacity of 5,329 MW including grid-connected ground-mounted plants as well as rooftop plants. But the capacity of SRTPV plants was just 154 MW.
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The revised National Solar Mission targets to be achieved by 2021-22 is 1,00,000 MW solar projects, while Karnataka’s Solar Policy 2014-21 has set a target of 6,000 MW solar projects, of which grid-connected rooftop generation projects will be 2,400 MW.
Referring to the poor response, a discussion paper from the commission earlier this year had said: “One of the reasons for the poor response to installation of SRTPV plants by domestic consumers may have been the low feed In tariff fixed by the commission compared to the relatively higher capital cost of smaller capacity SRTPV plants.
Proposed tariffs
According to a December 2018 order, the tariff fixed for 1-10 kW SRTPV plants was ₹4.15 per unit. In May, the tariff fixed for 1 to 1,000 kW was ₹3.56 per unit for the life the projects - 25 years.
The proposed tariffs for 1-10 kW plants for domestic consumers is ₹3.93 per unit, and for 1kW to 2000 kW plants is ₹3.18 per unit.