India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has greenlighted an additional six large-scale solar projects, propelling the country forward to its ambitious goal of achieving 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022, 100 GW of it generated from Solar PV.

Adding six new projects to India's approved solar parks brings the total to 33 parks across 21 states, in various states of development.  Once completed, these six new solar parks confirmed will serve to increase India's PV pipeline from 18.4 GW - confirmed at the end of 2015 - to 19.9 GW. 

Energy Minister Piyush Goyal recently chaired a Parliamentary Consultative Committee between the MNRE and officials representing the country's largest utility NTPC to deliver an update on the huge renewable energy project.  Mr. Goyal confirms that India now has more than 5 GW of connected solar PV capacity, and is expected to reach 9 GW by the end of March.  This will bring India on par with the UK in terms of cumulative capacity.  Mr. Goyal also stated his ministry's belief that India will reach 18 GW of PV capacity by the end of 2016.  This isn't fast enough to reach the  the goal of 100 GW by 2022, but it's an incredible leap from the moribund state of India's Solar capacity just three years ago.

India has now come extremely close to achieving the original aims of the ultra-mega solar park development plan which targeted 20GW capacity.