The government is unlikely to meet its much-publicised target of 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022 due to the poor progress of the rooftop solar programme, according to officials in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. The Ministry is also considering increasing the contribution of other sources like biogas and small hydro to make up the difference, they added. Several issues “You see, there are several issues with rooftop solar,” an official in the Ministry told The Hindu on the condition of anonymity. “The policy issue is that the tariff structure right now is such that it is just not remunerative for people to set up rooftop solar ,” the official said. New plan The government is aware of these issues and is considering a new plan to incentivise rooftop solar, he said. “There are talks in the Ministry about what to do about this,” he said. “But at the moment, it looks unlikely that the government will meet the 175 GW target because of this segment, solar rooftops. Every other segment is moving on track.” The government had announced a target of 40 GW of rooftop solar by 2022, but had achieved only about 1.3 GW as of December 2016, which is a little more than 3% of the target. “On current trends, it does look like the rooftop solar target will be missed,” Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment & Water told The Hindu . “The challenges for rooftop solar are different. The first is that we don’t have financial institutions aggregating demand across a fundamentally disparate set of projects. Unless this is done, it will be difficult to attract the kind of investment needed.” The second issue, Mr. Ghosh said, was the de-risking of investment in the rooftop space. While this has been done for commercial solar projects, it has not been done for rooftop solar. The third problem is that there is no regulatory clarity on guaranteed payment by utilities on the net metering basis. “If these are addressed, then the investment in this area can significantly pick up,” Mr. Ghosh said.