India's new solar mission opening a floodgate of opportunities

Clean energy, soul satisfying mission, and lots of money; all these objectives can be achieved if you are a solar energy expert or entrepreneur. The major catalyst for this is the recent announcement of "Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission" by Govt. of India.
The objectives of solar mission opens floodgate of opportunities for the wideband of human talent in energy and engineering sector in India and the world.

Here are the few key highlights of the solar mission:

To achieve grid parity through rapid scale-up of capacity and technological innovation by year 2022 and get the coal out by 2030.

Large scale implementation-support for off-grid solar applications such as solar lanterns, street lights, individual home lighting systems and many such single point use of solar energy. This way, all the remote villages and facilities in India can be electrically powered at less cost compared to pulling power cables along the hilly forest terrains. This way rural folks can leapfrog into solar technology ahead of urban localities.

The three phases of solar mission are 2009- 2013, 2013- 2017 and 2017-2022.

The first phase focuses on solar thermal, off-grid solar systems and modest capacity addition in grid-based systems. In the second phase production capacity will be aggressively ramped up.

The grid-connected power target is 1000 MW by 2013; an additional 3000 MW by 2017 and 20 GW by 2022. The off-grid target set is 1000 MW by 2017 and 2000MW by 2022. All combined set target by 2022 is 22 GW of solar power.

There are lots of subsidies and financial schemes supporting energetic entrepreneurs in this domain.

Some of off-grid examples mentioned include, Solar energy to power computers, management of forest resources, powering milk chilling plants, empowering women Self Help Groups (SHGs), and cold chain management for Primary Health Centres (PHCs)

The Mission will be technology neutral, allowing technological innovation and market conditions to determine technology winners.

What's up for semiconductor and electronics; a lot:
Special Incentive Package (SIPs) policy for solar semiconductor companies including domestic manufacture of silicon material. The PV solar cell and the ICs to convert the variable solar power to required voltage are entirely the semiconductor industry's fruit. The other emerging green technology, white LED based lamps also very much part of semiconductor industry. It's a major opportunity for power electronics engineers and analog semiconductor engineers who received less benefits from digital or IT world growth.
Mission document also talks about setting up of dedicated manufacturing capacities for poly silicon material to annually make about 2 GW capacity of solar cells.

Plenty of job opportunities: The solar technology requires highly educated experts to skilled technicians to maintenance workers. The first phase stresses on the requirement of at least 1000 young scientists and engineers, who would be incentivized to get trained on different solar energy technologies as a part of the Mission's long-term R&D and HRD plan. By end of Mission period, Solar industry is said to provide at least 100,000 trained and specialized personnel.

The mission also ensures the indigenous content is maximized.

For more detail visit mnes.nic.in