India Sees a Future Making Solar Panels for Itself, and Maybe the World

China, the world’s clean energy giant, faces a rival right next. And one of his best customers, nothing less.

India, a great buyer or Chinese solar panels and electric vehicle batteries, is using a series of government incentives to make more green equipment at home. It is driven not only for the need to meet galloping energy demands of its 1.4 billion people, but also to take advantage of another country because, to China, its energy supply chains, not in the United States.

India is still a small and late participant. Last year it produced around 80 gigawatts of solar modules, while China produced more than 10 times. India is still linked to coal, fossil fuel Dirt: coal is its greatest source of electricity, and India plans to extract more from it.

But India is trying to take advantage of a global energy transition and a violent reaction against the Chinese domain of new energy technologies.

With the hope of stimulating a clean energy manufacturing boom, the Government offers lucrative subsidies for solar cells and batteries produced locally, and is restricting foreign products in its largest renewable projects. To take advantage of government contracts to install solar energy on the roof for 27 million homes for the end of this decade, for example, companies must make panels at home.

For New Delhi, there are social, economic and geopolitical imperatives. China is the most formidable opponent, the two countries in the past went to war on border disputes, so the search for India to build factories of solar, wind and electrical vehicles is partly designed to ensure its energy supply chain. At the same time, India wants to create well -paid manufacturing work.

Even so, India faces a dilemma that faces many other countries: buying renewable energy technologies in the most economical way possible or spending more to make products at home.

“Strategically, to ensure that we have energy independence, we need to have manufacturing capacity,” said Sudeep Jain, an additional secretary in the New and Renewable Ministry of Energy of India. “Currently, yes, there is an cost arbitration.”