Investigating Impacts and Identifying Opportunities of Wide-scale Deployment of Solar Photovoltaic Water Pumps in India

Irrigation is essential to agricultural production, but remote farming areas in India often lack access to the electrical grid to power water pumps. Approximately 10 million farms rely on diesel pumps to provide the necessary water at the expense of incurring pollution and ongoing fuel costs. Alternatively, grid-connected pumps (~20-million) are subject to regular outages and receive power from a coal-dominated grid. To address these challenges faced by the farming community of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, in 2016, the Chhattisgarh State Renewable Energy Development Authority (CREDA) launched a wide-scale deployment of solar water irrigation pumps under a government program titled Saur Sujala Yojna. This initiative is bringing water access to tens of thousands of farms at a lower cost (90-95% subsidies are available to farmers) while reducing local pollutants and greenhouse gases. Our study, a collaboration between North Carolina State University and the National Institute of Technology-Raipur, investigates the impacts of this effort and identifies opportunities to more efficiently utilize the systems. Our project consists of a two-pronged approach. A large-scale survey of participating farmers, conducted across the state, offers new insights into the daily and seasonal utilization of these pumps, their impacts on agricultural productivity, as well as opportunities to more fully use the excess generation from the solar panels. A prototype of the solar water pump built at NIT-Raipur will simulate the responses to operational strategies and mitigate technical challenges as identified by the survey. Preliminary survey results offer new insights into operations and suggest opportunities to increase underutilized solar installations, while also providing recommendations to retrofit existing pumps to improve overall system performance. The project will benefit the global research community, industry, and policymakers by highlighting the key challenges faced in deploying distributed renewable generation technologies in developing countries.