International Solar Alliance's foundation day meet: All you need to know

The International Solar Alliance is holding its foundation day conference and celebrations on Sunday at the President House. India and France are the co-founders of the alliance which seeks to promote solar energy.

What is ISA?

Officially announced during UN Climate Change Conference in Paris on 30 November, 2015 the ISA is partnership of solar resource rich countries. Currently, there are 121 countries which have agreed to be members for ISA. Most of these are countries and organisations from Africa, South-east Asia and Europe. Pakistan is not a part of ISA, till yet.

Deja Vu?

During 2008-2010, Narendra Modi as the chief minister of Gujarat approached the then PM Manmohan Singh with a concept of Sun-Son – a group of Asia Pacific countries to come together for research and development in the solar energy sector. Modi, as CM at various public forums had also then rued the fact that this idea was not taken up by the Central Government.

“I had written to the Prime Minister some four or five years ago that our country should take the lead in solar power sector by launching a movement on the concept of Sun-Son, but there has been no reply from the PM so far,” Modi, said at a conclave in December 2010.

Sector experts said ISA is inspired from Sun-Son but now taken up at a larger level.

Why ISA?

As a part of its Climate Change commitments, India committed close to 40 per cent of its energy to come from renewable energy sources by 2022. The underlying rationale for ISA is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”, said the ISA working draft.

It also plans to increase the share of renewable energy in the global energy substantially by 2030. “By 2030, enhance international cooperation to facilitate access to clean energy research and technology, including renewable energy, energy efficiency and advanced and cleaner fossil-fuel technology, and promote investment in energy infrastructure and clean energy technology, said the ISA framework.

India’s role

Government of India will contribute $27 million to the ISA for creating the corpus, building infrastructure and recurring expenditure over a 5-year duration from 2016-17 to 2020-21. Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) and Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) have contributed US$ 1 million each for creating the ISA corpus fund. India’s Ministry of External Affairs through its Development Partnership Administration program has set aside US$ 1.5-2 billion as a line of credit facility to undertake solar projects in those African countries that have signed and ratified the ISA Framework Agreement.

What will ISA do for solar sector?

Around $1 trillion of capital for solar power projects is expected to be mobilised with this partnership. Out of this, around $500 billion is expected to come from corporate private sector. In the 5th meeting of the International Steering Committee of ISA on 20 February 2018, the proposal to extend the membership to all UN States has been accepted.

The ISA will particularly address the issues relating to high cost and low availability of finance, inadequate speed, scale, and skill for deploying available solar technologies and lack of appropriate R&D in future solar technologies. ISA will assist member countries to organize global investor meets on renewables which will give a boost to investments in the member country.

The recurring expenditure on ISA will be met from voluntary contributions from member countries, bilateral and multilateral agencies; other appropriate institutions; and from interest earned from the augmented corpus to be built up.