Workers of Solar Square place a panel on the rooftop of a residence in Gurugram on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. India is renewing its push to add rooftop solar to meet the needs of a fast-growing nation that’s hungry for energy.
| Photo Credit: AP

Just a few years ago, someone who wanted to install a rooftop solar connection in India faced getting multiple approvals, finding a reliable company to install the panels and spending heavily before seeing the first surge of clean energy.

But that’s changing. The government has streamlined the approvals process, made it easier for people to claim subsidies and pushed mountains of cash — including $9 billion announced this month — to encourage faster adoption of technology that’s seen as critical for India to reach its clean-energy goals.

“We had to get 45 signatures to set up a small rooftop solar connection in 2021,” said Shreya Mishra, CEO of Mumbai-based Solar Square, one of India’s largest rooftop solar companies. “Today it’s almost instantaneous.”

For this sun-soaked country, growth in rooftop solar can’t come soon enough. India last year became the world’s most populous nation, with 1.4 billion people and a hunger for energy that is rising fast.

Yet India, one of the world’s biggest emitters of planet-warming gases, is also highly vulnerable to climate change. Its people are affected by deadly floods, extreme rainfall, extreme heat, prolonged droughts and cyclones with increasing frequency. A study earlier this year found that nine out of India’s 28 states will be among the world’s hardest-hit regions due to climate change by midcentury.

India has grown its clean power rapidly in recent years and has the fourth-most installed renewable power, trailing only China, the U.S. and Brazil. It had 180 gigawatts as of December, enough to power about 18 million homes, with nearly half from solar.

But most of that solar power comes from numerous football-field-sized solar farms. Less than 15% comes from rooftop arrays, and India has so far managed to set up only 11 gigawatts of rooftop solar. That’s far less than the 40 gigawatts it hoped to have by 2022.

Energy experts say rooftop solar is essential to bring power to remote areas, where it can be installed cheaply where it’s needed and avoid the cost of transmitting the energy over long distances.

India’s latest push was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said the $9 billion would provide “free electricity” for up to 10 million homes.

Neeraj Kuldeep of the New Delhi-based think tank, Council on Energy, Environment and Water, has tracked rooftop solar for nearly a decade. A report from CEEW last year found that only 50% of Indians are likely aware of rooftop solar as an energy solution and most of those who were aware thought it was too expensive. The report released last November recommended subsidies for consumers who can benefit from small rooftop solar arrays but can’t afford them.

Kuldeep said consumer awareness about rooftop solar is one key to driving growth. Others are efficient governments at both the federal and state level, and finding the right “fit” for a particular user’s power needs.

Experts say another is getting buy-in from state-owned electricity companies who sometimes see rooftop solar as a threat to their profits.

Kuldeep said that’s short-sighted. The companies can often actually make more money if they help install rooftop solar in a low-consumption home, he said. That’s because they cut their transmission and distribution costs to carry power to a house with a subsidized bill that already earns them little profit.

Installations have also risen since the government launched a national rooftop solar portal in 2022 that consumers can use to claim and steer government subsidies directly to their bank account, say experts and rooftop solar companies.

Mysun, a rooftop solar company based in New Delhi, offers potential buyers a “solar calculator” on its website where they can enter their location and current electricity costs to see what kind of savings they could expect. CEO Gagan Vermani said it’s about simplifying the process for potential customers.

“We need to start thinking of (rooftop solar) with consumer needs in mind rather than thinking of it as building solar infrastructure,” he said.

Those who are already hooked up with panels on their roofs tout the benefits of cheaper electricity and greater agency over their own power.

“It is a little expensive but it’s totally worth it,” said Ruchika Chahana, who lives in the affluent Greater Kailash neighborhood in New Delhi. Chahana installed rooftop solar in her home nine months ago at a cost of nearly $5,000. She said her summer electricity bills have fallen to about $50 a month, from $200, and her family feels great about “doing something to save the planet.”

In Bengaluru, Satish Mallya saw rooftop solar as essential both to save money and avert carbon emissions. He took the lead in installing 65 kilowatts of solar atop the 120-unit apartment complex he lives in, and the building’s electricity costs have dropped $700 a month.

That 2020 installation was “challenging” because of bureaucratic hurdles, said Mallya, who serves as vice president of a citywide group that represents apartment dwellers and owners. He’s helped many others set up their own rooftop solar connections in the years since, and says the process has gotten easier.

Mishra, of Solar Square, said she’s seeing a big increase in interest in a technology that she calls “a key part of India’s energy future.”

“As an Indian and an entrepreneur, I’m extremely proud of seeing this getting built up,” she said. “I think building energy infrastructure is the greatest nation-building thing we can do.”

In 2022, the burning of fossil fuels provided 82% of the world’s energy. In 2000, it was 87%. Even as renewables have undergone tremendous growth, they’ve been offset by increased demand for energy.

That’s why the United Nations earlier this month released a global stocktake – an assessment on how the world is going in weaning itself off these energy-dense but dangerously polluting fuels. Short answer: progress, but nowhere near enough, soon enough.

If we consult history, we find that energy transitions are not new. To farm fields and build cities, we’ve gone from relying on human or animal muscle to wind and water to power sailboats and mill grain. Then we began switching to the energy dense hydrocarbons, coal, gas and oil. But this can’t last. We were first warned in 1859 that when burned, these fuels add to the Earth’s warming blanket of greenhouse gases and threatening our liveable climate.

It’s time for another energy transition. We’ve done it before. The problem is time – and resistance from the old energy regime, fossil fuel companies. Energy historian Vaclav Smil calculates past energy transitions have taken 50–75 years to ripple through societies. And we no longer have that kind of time, as climate change accelerates. This year is likely the hottest in 120,000 years.

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So can we learn anything from past energy transitions? As it happens, we can.

Energy shifts happen in fits and starts

Until around 1880, the world ran on wood, charcoal, crop residue, manure, water and wind. In fact, some countries relied on wood and charcoal throughout the 20th century – even as others were shifting from coal to oil.

The English had used coal for domestic heating from the time of the Romans because it burned longer and had nearly double the energy intensity of wood.

So what drove the shift? Deforestation was a part. The reliance on wood worked while there were trees. In the pre-industrial era, cities of 500,000 or more needed huge areas of forests around them.

In some locales wood seemed boundless, free and expendable. The costs to biodiversity would become apparent only later.

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Britain was once carpeted in forest. Endemic deforestation drove the change to coal in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most English coal pits opened between 1540 and 1640.

When the English figured out how to use coal to make steam and push a piston, it made even more possible – pumping water from deepening mining pits, the invention of locomotives, and transporting produce, including the feed needed by working animals.

Yet for all this, coal had only reached 5% of the global market by 1840.

In North America, coal didn’t overtake wood until as late as 1884 – even as crude oil became more important.

Why did America first start exploiting oil reserves? In part to replace expensive oil from the heads of sperm whales. Before hydrocarbon oil was widely available, whaling was depended upon for lubricants and some lighting. In 1846, the US had 700 whaling vessels scouring the oceans for this source of oil.

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Crude oil was struck first in Pennsylvania in 1859. To extract it required drilling down 21 metres. The drill was powered by a steam engine – which may have been fired by wood.

Steam and muscle

The 19th century energy transition took decades. It wasn’t a revolution so much as a steady shift. By the end of that century, global energy supply had doubled and half of it was from coal.

When they were first invented in 1712, steam engines converted just 2% of coal into useful energy. Almost 150 years later they were still highly inefficient at just 15%. (Petrol-powered cars still waste about 66% of the energy in their fuel).

Even so, steam sped up early proto-industries such as textiles, print production and traditional manufacturing.

But the engines did not free us from the yoke. In fact, early coal mining actually increased demand for human labour. Boys as young as six worked at lighter tasks. Conditions were generally horrific. Alongside human muscle was animal strength. Coal was often raised from pits by draft horses.

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In 1850s New England, steam was three times more expensive than water flows powering textile mills. Vaclav Smil has shown industrial waterwheels and turbines “competed successfully with steam engines for decades”. The energy of flowing water was free. Digging up coal was labor-intensive.

Why did steam win? Human ecologist Andreas Malm argues what really drove the shift to steam-powered mills was capital. Locating steam engines in urban centres made it easier to concentrate and control workers, as well as overcoming worker walk-outs and machine breaking.

The question of who does the work is often overlooked. When energy historians refer vaguely to human muscle, we should ask: whose muscles? Was the work done by slaves or forced labourers?

Even in the current energy transition there can be gross disparities between employer and worker. As heat intensifies, some employers are giving ice vests to their migrant workers so they can keep working. That’s reminiscent of coal shovelers in the furnace-like stokeholes of steam ships being immersed in ice-baths on collapse, as historian On Barak has shown.

What does this mean for us?

As Vaclav Smil points out, “every transition to a new energy supply has to be powered by the intensive deployment of existing energies and prime movers”. In fact, Smil argues the idea of the “industrial revolution” is misleading. It was not sudden. Rather, it was “gradual, often uneven”.

History may seem like it unfolds neatly. But it doesn’t at all. In earlier transitions, we see overlaps. Hesitation. Sometimes, more intense use of earlier energy sources. They start as highly localised shifts, depending on available resources, before new technologies spreads along trade routes. Ultimately market forces have driven – or hindered – adoption.

Time is short. But on the plus side, there are market forces now driving the shift to clean energy. Once solar panels and wind turbines are built, sunlight and wind are free. It is the resistance of the old guard – fossil fuel corporations – that is holding us back.