Solar Federalism: What Explains the Variation in Solar Capacity Additions by India’S States?
Energy Research & Social Science 71 (2021) 101815 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy Research & Social Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/erss Solar federalism: What explains the variation in solar capacity additions by India’s states? Joshua W. Busby, Sarang Shidore LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, United States ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: In 2014, India embarked on an ambitious effort to scale-up solar electricity. Despite a major top-level push by the India central government, India’s states show stark variation in their performance as measured by installed utility-scale Solar solar capacity. This paper seeks to explain that puzzle. We first code 19 of India’s states on utility-scale solar Renewables performance and classify them into categories of Achievers, Middlers, Laggards, and Marginals. We then identify Climate change plausible and testable factors of performance including solar irradiance, power deficits, distribution company Mitigation Energy transition financialhealth, coal costs, land access, and political alignment of the state with the central government. Overall, Federalism irradiance, distribution company health, coal costs, and land access were the most influential, but counter- intuitively, political alignment was minimally relevant. Achievers tended to have some favorable combination of irradiance, power deficits, distribution company health, coal costs, and in some cases land access. Marginals were associated with unfavorable Discom health, land access, and coal costs. Patterns for Middlers and Laggards were less clear. To identify additional state-specificfactors that affected performance, we also carry out detailed case studies for three states - Karnataka (Achiever), Madhya Pradesh (Middler), and Maharashtra (Laggard). These show the importance of political and bureaucratic leadership, path-dependence, and interest group in fluence.
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