Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a message at the inaugural session of First World Solar Technology Summit read out by R.K. Singh, the President, International Solar Alliance (ISA) Assembly and Minister for Power and New & Renewable Energy, said, that technology holds the key to scale up the use of solar energy. Technological achievements have already brought about a significant reduction in the price of solar power. A further reduction in the cost will provide a major boost to the use and expansion of renewable energy. He expressed confidence that the summit will help in help in developing new technologies and ensure that they become available to all.
World Solar Technology Summit (WSTS) organised by ISA and FICCI aims to bring together key stakeholders – leading academic scientists, technology developers, researchers and innovators to present and discuss the recent highlights of solar technologies, cost-wise; technology-wise, technology transfers, challenges and concerns in the field. PM re-iterated that Five years ago, world leaders had taken a pledge to restrict the rise in global temperature through a gradual reduction in the dependence on fossil fuels. Underlining India’s commitment lowering carbon footprints, he stressed that India has lowest per-capita carbon emissions in the world but we have still pressed ahead with deployment of renewable energy at a frenetic pace. India has enhanced its installed renewable capacity by 2.5 times and increased our solar installed capacity by more than 13 times. Globally India now ranks 4th in terms of Renewable power, PM said.
He also informed that we have scaled our non-fossil fuel-based power generations to 134GW, which is about 35 % of our total power generation. We are confident of increasing it to 220 GW by 2022. “We want to take renewable energy to every village of our country. Our government has implemented a scheme named KUSUM that aims to replace the use of diesel in our farm sector with solar energy. Under this scheme, we have targeted the solarisation of 2.8 million irrigation pumps. Such schemes will not only benefit the environment, but also increase the income of our farmers.” he said.
The Prime Minister also said, “The ISA is a part of “One Word One Sun One Grid” project, I firmly believe that this project can bring transformational benefits for the entire humanity. Nobel Laureate, Dr M Stanley Whittingham, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with John B Goodenough & Akira Yoshino) in 2019 for the revolutionizing discovery of the lithium ion batteries and Mr Bernard Piccard, Founder and Chairman of Solar Impulse Foundation, Switzerland also joined the summit virtually.
