

Ministry of Power Proposes Allowing Net Metering for Rooftop Solar up to 500 kW – Visol India
The Ministry of Power has published a draft amendment to Electricity Rules 2020, which is also known as Rights of Consumer, about the Net-Metering policy. As per these updates, now solar EPC companies are allowed to use a net-metering policy on, up to 500 kW or the permitted limit, which is lesser. Besides, EPC companies will use either net billing / gross metering or net feed-in policy for all capacities above 500 KW. Ministry of Power also allows stakeholders to submit their comments to the ministry till 30th April 2021. For the prosumers, who avail net-billing or net feed-in, in Draft Amendment stated that the Commissions may introduce time-of-the-day (ToD) tariffs which would incentivize prosumers to install energy storage for later use or can be fed into the grid during peak hours. Moreover with this, the DISCOM may also install a solar energy meter to measure gross solar energy generated from the grid-interactive rooftop photovoltaic system for renewable energy purchase obligation (RPO) credit. At the starting of this year, GOI set a bottom line for the net metering which is 10KW but later some state government further lowered it to 5 KW. This made the entire rooftop segment of the solar industry very unstable. This new policy has not been well received by the solar developers, especially from the state of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra a lot of counter-argument was received. Not only the developers but for solar owners were also not happy with this. This policy has increased the ROI and lowered the financial benefits. The Maharashtra Solar Sangathan wrote a letter to Mr. Nitin Gadkari informing how this new policy is going to crush the MSMEs. Seeing this, Minister of MSMEs Nitin Gadkari had to intervene and he shared the concerns of the clients to the Power Minister