India is working hard towards reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and moving to alternative/renewable power source. As part of this effort we have been aggressively installing more and more solar plants across India. The Delhi Metro installed India’s First Vertical Bi-Facial Solar Plant last week. The new 50kW vertical solar plant at Okhla Vihar Metro Station features bi-facial panels that capture sunlight from both sides, enhancing energy generation efficiency.
India added a record 25 GW solar capacity in 2024 which is a 204% jump from previous year. Part of it was due to the commissioning of projects that supposed to go online in 2023 but got delayed and went live in 2024. Even with that being the case this is a great milestone and the total generation capacity for India has topped 100GW, putting India in the top 3 countries worldwide for Solar power production.
Solar and other green energy sources are awesome. They allow you to generate power without creating harmful byproducts like coal or petrol based energy generators do. Unfortunately this means that Coal and Oil industries are completely against them and constantly create posts, advertisements and ‘research’ that show how bad the renewable energy sources are. Basically it is a constant bombardment of FUD (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt) to cause people to distrust the technology.
The following comics keep showing up in my feed and it is typical of how people portray green power and electric vehicles. According to them there is no point in getting an electric car or a green power alternative because they all use coal/gas fueled power plants in the background and that can’t be further from the truth.

In fact, the main reason ‘people’ (read oil/coal companies) don’t want us to switch to renewable is explained very well by the following comic:

Solar Power isn’t feasible because we can’t own the sun
One (valid) cause for concern is that it is expensive to setup, which is true but not the whole story. We setup a solar power plant at my parents place in Delhi and while it does take up space it is not as bad as people make it sound. One set of panels actually makes a great share in front of the room on the roof, the other is on top of that room so helps keep the temperature in that room down and with the temperature in Delhi hitting 52.8 Deg C it is not a small consideration.
The setup we have is for a 10kwa solar panels and it costed us ~4,50,000 lac. Based on our regular usage we will recover the cost in about 4 1/2 years (its been almost 4 years since we set it up).
There is a pretty good subsidy for Solar being offered by the Indian government at the central level so it is a great time to setup a Solar power plan wherever you can. My cousin has also set it up in UP and it is a big help over there because they are no longer dependent on the power company for power.
With the new more powerful panels nowadays the time taken to recover the cost of the setup is down to a few years. To be fair, the process of generating the solar panel does create waste that is a pollutant but that is minuscule compared to the waste generated by a coal/gas power plant.
– Suramya