JNNSM | Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission

The National Solar Mission is a major initiative of the Government of India and State Governments to promote ecologically sustainable growth while addressing India’s energy security challenge.  It will also constitute a major contribution by India to the global effort to meet the challenges of climate change. India is a tropical country, where sunshine is available for longer hours per day and in great intensity.  Solar energy, therefore, has great potential as future energy source.  It also has the advantage of permitting the decentralized distribution of energy, thereby empowering people at the grassroots level.
Solar is currently high on absolute costs compared to other sources of power such as coal.  The objective of the Solar Mission is to create conditions, through rapid scale-up of capacity and technological innovation to drive down costs towards grid parity. India is endowed with vast solar energy potential. About 5,000 trillion kWh per year energy is incident over India’s land area with most parts receiving 4-7 kWh per sq. m per day. Hence both technology routes for conversion of solar radiation into heat and electricity, namely, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics, can effectively be harnessed providing huge scalability for solar in India. Also Solar energy is environmentally friendly as it has zero emissions while generating electricity or heat.

Objective of JNNSM
The objective of the National Solar Mission is to establish India as a global leader in solar energy, by creating the policy conditions for its diffusion across the country as quickly as possible. The Mission will adopt a 3-phase approach, spanning the remaining period of the 11th Plan and first year of the 12th Plan (up to 2012-13) as Phase 1, the remaining 4 years of the 12th Plan (2013-17) as Phase 2 and the 13th Plan (2017-22) as Phase 3. The immediate aim of the Mission is to focus on setting up an enabling environment for solar technology penetration in the  country both at a centralized and decentralized level.
The first phase (up to 2013) will focus on capturing of the lowhanging options in solar thermal; on promoting off-grid systems to serve populations without access to commercial energy and modest capacity addition in grid-based systems. In the second phase, after taking into account the experience of the initial years, capacity will be aggressively ramped up to create conditions for up scaled and competitive solar energy penetration in the country. The ultimate target of the mission is to create an enabling policy framework for the deployment of 20,000 MW of solar power by 2022.

Latest News on India Solar Energy
Jan 2012 : Mahindra Solar Rajasthan unit on Stream. Mahindra Solar One, a solar power developer, commissioned its first 5 MW solar power plant. A part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) policy, the project is located near Jodhpur in Rajasthan. The engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) arm of Mahindra Solar, Mahindra EPC, has commissioned this project in a record time of 100 days and the plant is expected to provide solar electricity equivalent to around 60,000 rural homes and avoid emissions of about 8,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Mahindra Solar One is a joint venture between Kiran Energy and Mahindra and plans to play a larger role in solar power generation both as an EPC contractor in on-grid and off-grid and as a developer set up greater than 100 MW in the next 2-3 years. International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector investment arm of the World Bank Group, will provide $5 million or Rs 25 crore in debt-financing to Mahindra Solar One Pvt Ltd for the 5 MW solar power project in Rajasthan.

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