Minerals in our solar future

If India walks the talk toward greater self-sufficiency in the renewable energy industry, it could slow the march of China to global dominance in the full spectrum of the solar energy industry

The current crisis in ties with China requires us to review critical energy sector dependencies on the northern neighbour. Our drive to achieve ambitious goals for generating solar energy — 100 GW by 2022 — has provided China a major market for its solar PV cells and modules over the last decade. As Indian enterprise focussed on solar power generation plants, imports of solar panels, modules etc soared to over $3 billion in 2016, most of it from China. Safeguard duties have reduced the import bill of the solar sector to $1.7 billion, but 80 per cent is still from