Solarrooftop
Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India, is implementing a ‘Grid-Connected Rooftop Solar Program’, to achieve the target of 40GW of solar rooftop installations by the year 2022. However, the installed capacity of RTS in the country is acutely lagging behind with less than 6GW installed till Q2 of FY 2021-22.
A recent study by USAID and NREL revealed that lack of ‘Quality and Safety’ of most installed Rooftop systems were among the main reasons for the slow growth in this sector. The principal factors that led to poor ‘Quality and Safety’ were found to be:
a) Cut-throat competition leading to low price and therefore poor quality systems.
b) No barriers for market entry of vendors, resulting in inexperienced and untrained vendors providing poor services to consumers, who are therefore unable to realize the expected and committed performance from their Rooftop Solar Systems.
In order to raise the confidence of the investors and consumers by improving the quality and safety of Rooftop Solar systems, USAID and CII-Godrej GBC have jointly developed a Vendor Rating Framework to address these concerns.
This framework provides a benchmarking tool for evaluating the various Solar Engineering, Procurement and Construction companies (EPCs or Installers or Vendors) on a uniform set of parameters and then confer upon them, a Rating to recognize the level of their competence. The framework assesses the Vendors on both financial and technical capabilities as well as on the on-site performance of two selected Rooftop systems installed by them in the recent years.
