SEMI India's Thrust on Solar

A new beginning at SEMI India was on the cards, given that Debashish Chowdhury has now taken over. There was a meeting with SEMI India last week, where the thrust was clearly on solar.

The meeting introduced a whole lot of new faces. Some of the key participants at the meeting included S.R.C. Sathyanarayan of TUV India, Amit Joshi of MAG-IAS India, A. Kotwal of Frost, Nandeesh Kumar of Emmvee, Arul Murugan of Ferrotec Japan, Rajnikanth Umakanthan of UL, C.M. Venugopalan of Bosch India, Raghu Nandan of Kotak Urja, SCB Solar, and so on, as well as yours truly.

Some of the key suggestions received by SEMI India were:

SEMI to be industry voice provider and represent industry interest to the government;
conduct awareness program for installers, manufacturers and others;
send a questionnaire on the issues that SEMI should be addressing in a white paper;
provide all participants the link to the article by Dr. Gangadhar Rao on Poly Si as well as the article on Feed-in Tariff published by the PV group in the earlier newsletters;
more frequent shuttle services to be provided during Solarcon India event.

Now, it is well known that there's the Solarcon India 2011 event this November. The kickoff this year was aimed at getting new participants as well as influencing the older ones – not that they needed any prodding.

What was evident were the key questions raised by some of the participants. One of them being, what's happening with the Indian solar industry?

That's an interesting point! While a lot of new suppliers are starting with 5-MW licenses, it seems they are in the cut off' mode. Cut off, in the sense that they have been given 5-MW licenses and no more. Will they be able to extend their licenses? It remains to be seen!

One other point raised during the discussion included the Karnataka State government's interaction with the Indian industry to do something about the semicon policy.

Seems, there has not been many (or any) takes so far, for the Karnataka Semicon Policy. But, that is yet another story!

Pradeep