Challenges in meeting all of India's electricity from solar: An energetic approach

India's electricity requirements will continue to grow with its increasing population and urbanization. Climate change, increased carbon emissions, and the depletion of nonrenewable energy resources have forced India to shift to renewable energy resources. India's solar potential is large enough to provide 100-percent of its current electricity requirements if photovoltaic arrays and energy storage infrastructure of sufficient size is deployed. In this paper, we modeled the dynamics of net electricity input and output from a photovoltaic electricity (PV) system as it is built out to provide the entire electricity demand by 2050. The results showed that building a PV system large enough to meet the nation's entire electricity demand by 2050 is possible; however, it will require a rapid increase in the deployment of solar PV and the associated storage infrastructure over the next few decades. Such rapid expansion of the PV system will require substantial electricity allocation away from general societal use and towards building the photovoltaic system equipment and integrating it with existing infrastructure. This will lead to a short-term lack of electricity supply for general use by society.