Examine the financial and technical viability of solar energy projects in India. Also discuss the Government Schemes launched to promote solar energy in the country.

Financial viability

• Utility-scale solar became competitive with new coal on a generation-cost basis in many auctions as module and balance-of-system costs fell.
• Viability still hangs on DISCOM offtake: delayed payments, renegotiated power-purchase agreements, and weak state utilities can turn a cheap kilowatt-hour into a stranded asset.
• Capital is available from green bonds, IREDA, and multilateral lines, but currency and interest-rate swings hit imported modules and dollar debt.
• Land lease, evacuation lines, and goods-and-services tax on equipment are the quiet cost lines that decide whether a bid was reckless.

Technical viability

• Intermittency: solar stops at night and dips with cloud; without storage or flexible coal/hydro, a high solar share stresses frequency and ramping.
• Grid: parks in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh need green corridors; congestion, not irradiance, is often the binding constraint.
• Land and water: large parks compete with agriculture; module cleaning in dry belts is a real operations cost.
• Import dependence on cells and wafers is a technical-industrial risk; domestic PLI for manufacturing tries to shorten that chain.
• Rooftop and agri-solar face net-metering disputes and weak last-mile wiring more often than a physics problem.

Government schemes

• Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission set the 2022-era frame: 100 GW solar within the 175 GW renewable target (roughly 40 GW rooftop, 40 GW parks, 20 GW other).
• Solar Park scheme bundles land and evacuation so developers bid on generation, not on a land fight.
• Grid-connected rooftop programmes and later PM Surya Ghar-type residential push (after this paper’s year, the logic was already rooftop-first) aim at self-consumption.
• PM-KUSUM (2019) solarises pumps and supports decentralised farm solar so diesel and night coal are not the only farm power.
• Production-linked incentive for high-efficiency modules, and International Solar Alliance diplomacy, complete the industrial and external face.

Viability is therefore cheap electrons plus a paying DISCOM plus a wire that can carry them.