Government Plans To Achieve 20,000 MW Of Solar Production By 2017

NEW DELHI, April 3: Power Minister Piyush Goyal has said that the government plans to achieve 20,000 MW of solar production by 2017. "The solar energy mission envisaged 20,000 MW of solar electricity generation by 2022. But this target has been scaled up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to 1,00,000 MW (1Gw) by 2022," he said at a symposium "Conference of Parties (COP 21) Building Synergies, Shaping Actions" organised at the University of Mumbai yesterday. Goyal said his Ministry has already bid out 19,000 MW of solar energy projects and the installed capacity of 20,000 MW would be achieved as early as 2017. He said this is the advantage of the Prime Minister's style of setting aggressive targets. The Prime Minister goes by the idea that unless you have aggressive targets you will never be able to achieve extraordinary goals. PTI had erroneously reported from Mumbai yesterday that the Centre would achieve its ambitious target of 100 GW of solar capacity generation by 2017. What the Minister had actually said was that the Prime Minister had scaled up the solar power target to 1,00,000 MW by 2022 -PTI