The renewable energy sector may find it difficult to realise the targets set for them without clarity on the funding of various schemes announced in the budget, sector experts and analysts said here on Monday.
“We welcome the various initiatives for a green India, outlined in Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s first full budget, but there are apprehensions about accessing the funds that are existing and also the new ones that have been announced in the budget,” S. P. Gon Chaudhuri, an adviser to the Central Government on renewable energy issues, said. In the absence of methodologies for accessing funds such as the National Clean Energy Fund (NCEF) , it became difficult to draw upon these resources, he said. The fund was announced by the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in 2010. It was put under the Union Finance Ministry as a corpus for funding research and innovation in renewable energy.
Set up on the principle of polluter pays, Coal India Ltd. was supposed to pay Rs.50 as a cess for every tonne of coal it raised. Mr. Jaitley raised this to Rs.200 in his latest budget.
The NCEF is estimated to have swelled to over Rs.30,000 crore and reports suggest that in the absence of strict guidelines and a firm methodology, the fund is lying mostly unutilised. He pointed out that the targets, especially for solar energy, appeared to be stiff given the performance of the sector so far.
Against the targeted 1.75 lakh MW for solar energy by 2022, only around 3,000 MW of installed capacity had been created.
