CHANDIGARH: Centre’s deliberate lop sided policy to promote private solar power generation plants at the cost of the taxpayer needs an independent judicial enquiry , said EAS Sarma former power and finance secretary in his letter to Cabinet secretary .
The private solar companies get Rs.35000 crores as subsidies , besides this the domestic consumers will be paying private solar power promoters Rs. 33, 000 crores annually .Even in the process of creating back-up storage facilities to sustain centralised solar power generation, the authorities seem to benefit private companies at the cost of the tax-payers, the State DISCOMs and the consumers. The Centre has allocated Rs 9, 000 crores of tax-payers’ money to cover 40% of the capital cost of private companies’ storage systems through Viability Gap Funding (VGF).
The NDA government at different levels seems to create newer and newer opportunities for promoters of private companies to earn profits on one excuse or the other.
The global solar and renewable energy scenario points to rapid technological advances, which are bringing down the cost of solar power and energy storage systems every day.
While the Ministry of Renewable Energy has no doubt undertaken a half-hearted scheme to promote rooftop solar panels to benefit individual consumers, the financial incentives they get are miniscule compared to what promoters of centralised plants get.
V K Gupta informed that the letter mentions that the whole range of lop-sided policy decisions taken to help big businesses to profiteer at the cost of the public seems to be part of a well-orchestrated scam that calls for an independent judicial enquiry. Such an inquiry is necessary, as already suggested, to examine the policy asymmetries that enriched private solar companies, to assess the magnitude of undue costs imposed on millions of electricity consumers and to evaluate the fate of the tax-payers' funds diverted to subsidise private promoters of solar plants, so that the Parliament and the public may get to know how the Union government and the states have placed the interests of private corporate entities over and above the public interest
He also criticised the 'deemed generation' clauses in long-term PPAs that compel DISCOMs to pay private developers even when no electricity is generated. “Every such opportunity for a private company to enrich itself has imposed a corresponding cost on the taxpayer or the consumer.