Panasonic Life Solutions India has launched residential solar kits that are easy to install and maintain. Confident that new initiatives like the PM Suryoday Yojana will have a multiplying effect in adoption in the country, the company will expand its offerings to multiple cities and achieve pan-India coverage by 2025. Amit Barve, Business Head of Solar, PEWIN, Panasonic Life Solutions India, tells Sudhir Chowdhary how the company plans to popularise the solar residential kits among households.
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Which are the states at the forefront of adoption in the residential sector?
Gujarat has the highest penetration, followed by Kerala. Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Odisha, Haryana, Jammu, Telangana, and Karnataka, come after them. During the first three quarters of this fiscal, 584 million pieces were installed. The last six quarters have seen a dominance of residential rooftop installations over other rooftop installations, indicating the momentum that policy actions have generated.
With initiatives like the PM Suryoday Yojana, we expect further multiplying effect in India. This FY we expect installations to be in the range of 1GW and steadily increasing to 1.5 GW by FY27. In the next three years, we anticipate that 10% of the home solar market will use kitting solutions rather than loose installations.
What are Panasonic’s plans to promote B2C solar kits for the residential sector?
We started offering our residential solar kits in the last six months as a pilot in two cities—Nashik and Pune. We have adopted a classical approach of two-tier distribution including a distributor stocking these kits locally and sold through our trained authorised system integrators, followed by one year of service through our customer support team. This strategy of including service along with supply as well as making kits locally available is helping us in scaling up faster. We intend to replicate this offering pan India in a stage-wise manner. We have started exporting solar components like solar modules and have added 11 countries to our expansion plan.
Is cost a major deterrent when it comes to households deploying solar kits?
Any family consuming more than 300 KWh of energy comes within the financial reach of the current tariff system, even if the user chooses to take out a loan to purchase solar equipment. Since net metering is available in every state, the monthly payment will be equal to the amount they would have paid for energy previously, providing an payback period of nearly five years.
What are the measures required to keep the momentum going?
Awareness about the benefits of using solar energy is still very low. So, all our efforts for this segment are directed towards creating awareness about financial as well as environmental benefits. We are working with our partners, especially NBFCs in developing easy financial products which help in smooth adoption for consumers with small upfront payments.
