From Paris To Bharat Mandapam: PM Modi's Solar Alliance Grows

In the first six months of this fiscal year alone India has added 24.56 GW of renewable capacity.

On the opening day of COP21 in Paris (30th November 2015), PM Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande announced the International Solar Alliance (ISA). The concept was aimed at countries that have lots of sun and very little credit. The idea was that the ISA would help these countries develop solar projects and then help them get the finance to actually build them.

The Alliance’s 9th Assembly gets under way at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 2nd November with PM Modi opening the proceedings. India has filled the same building with two other events which are running until 5th November. The first is the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit and Expo (taking the place of the old RE-Invest summit). The second is the 4th International Conference on Green Hydrogen. Delegations from over 130 countries and more than 40 Ministers are expected.

Pralhad Joshi, Union Minister of New and Renewable Energy, is the Chairman of the Assembly as President. Mathieu Lefèvre, France’s Minister Delegate for Ecological Transition, is co-chair. Paris would like another term as co-president of the alliance. Lefèvre is in Delhi in part to secure that.

Africa is the perfect example of why the ISA was necessary. The ISA puts it at about 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources being on the continent, yet Africa has just about 1 per cent of the world’s installed solar capacity. Investment has followed the same pattern. In 2024 investors put US$521bn into solar globally but only about US$9bn of that went to Africa.

Banks view the small projects in the poorer countries as very risky and as a result they charge such high interest rates that many of them simply can’t go ahead.

The Pacific islands have it far worse. The WEF reckon some spend as much as 12.9% of their GDP on imported fossil fuels.

How the alliance closes the gap

The ISA’s principal tool is to take on some of the risk which keeps the private sector at arm’s length. Its Africa Solar Facility (run by Africa50, the pan-African infrastructure investor) provides payment guarantees for small scale solar projects such as village mini-grids and solar irrigation. India has contributed US$25m to the facility. The facility is designed to raise around US$700m in public and private funds (so roughly $28 for every $1 that India has put in).

ISA Director General Ashish Khanna announced at the alliance’s Africa meeting in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe this August that the next three countries the ISA will be working with are Zimbabwe, Senegal and Seychelles. Each of these countries will be signing a Country Partnership Framework with the ISA. The CPFs are multi-year agreements under which the ISA brings its expertise to help governments develop their national solar plans and to identify lenders.

The ISA also published a strategy at the meeting with the aim of taking Africa from circa 20GW of solar today to between 150 and 200GW by 2030. To achieve this it plans to take a number of key actions: to expand its partnership framework with national governments to support them in developing clear solar roadmaps; to scale up its blended finance facilities and guarantees to attract private investment, leveraging public funds from member countries and from multilateral lenders.

The alliance will be increasing its technical assistance and capacity building in local institutions and utilities to ensure the projects are viable and sustainable. The ISA also intends to establish regional hubs, develop aggregated tenders and support cross-border transmission links in order to make solar power more accessible and affordable across the region.

Mauritius was the first African country to sign up to such a framework in April 2025. In June of this year it put out a tender for 220MW of solar with battery storage across 13 sites. That tender was on a digital marketplace that the ISA built in partnership with the World Bank to allow island states to showcase their projects to the international development community.

Mauritius now has 168.5MW of solar. The new plants would more than double that. Fossil fuels still provide over 80 per cent of the island’s electricity.

In the same month the ISA and the World Bank held their first Island Dialogue for the Pacific in Bali, Indonesia with Fiji, PNG and the Solomons in attendance. Khanna noted that by aggregating the islands’ demand on one platform the ISA could go on to help deliver 500MW of solar by 2030. The combined order is large enough to attract developers who would not otherwise bid for a single small island.

India has also funded projects directly. In November 2024 the Ministry of External Affairs signed an agreement with the ISA to fund $2m in solar projects in Comoros, Fiji, Madagascar and Seychelles. The projects are intended to address unreliable power in health centres and the lack of cold storage for farm produce.

Why India’s record carries weight

India developed this capability in-house prior to making it available to the rest of the world. Installed solar capacity went from 2.82 GW in 2014 to 171.05 GW as at 30th September this year (data from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy). In the first six months of this fiscal year alone India has added 24.56 GW of renewable capacity.

Total renewable capacity (including large hydro) is now at 299.25GW. The solar module factories on the government’s approved list have over 230GW of capacity.

The H2 conference is sitting alongside the solar assembly as green hydrogen is the next leg of India’s offer. An electrolyser takes electricity and splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is only ‘green’ if the electricity is from the sun or wind. Power is also the biggest cost so cheap solar is the key to green hydrogen being able to compete.

India aims to produce 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030 as part of its National Green Hydrogen Mission. To that end the government has provided incentives to 15 companies to set up factories capable of producing 3,000 megawatts of electrolyser capacity per year. There have also been auctions to fix prices for 7.24 lakh tonnes of green ammonia per year for 13 fertilizer plants. Sunny countries that import both fertiliser and fuel can of course adopt the same approach and produce both of those commodities at home.

The ISA is now actively working to share India’s policy frameworks and lessons with other member countries. It is providing technical assistance on the design of incentive schemes, auction mechanisms and partnership models for domestic green hydrogen and green ammonia production. This will be done through a range of activities including workshops, expert exchanges and targeted country support to help governments formulate their own plans which are investment ready and will drive their energy transitions.

An alliance that builds

In 2015 the ISA declaration was signed in Paris. There are now 128 countries in the ISA according to the organisers of this week’s Assembly. It runs a guarantee facility in Africa and a procurement platform for island states. It also facilitates the signing of partnership agreements which in turn help governments to turn their national plans into tenders.

The big lenders and the major powers have for years regarded countries like Senegal and the Solomon Islands as being too small or too risky. It’s the countries that are benefitting the most from the alliance.

The next one is to turn those tenders and guarantees into actual plants. By hosting the Solar Assembly, its own investment summit and the Hydrogen conference all in one building, India has made Delhi the place that the sunnier, cash poor countries come to for partners and finance. Eleven years on from Paris, the alliance between Modi and Hollande that was launched there has delivered projects with India as the anchor.

The coming years will tell us whether the alliance can keep up the pace, deal with the issues of reliable project delivery, scale up the models to other countries and secure a sustained stream of private investment. The way the ISA deals with the various challenges will be a key indicator. Will it be able to forge new partnerships? How quickly will the projects actually get to the ground following the high level commitments made in Delhi?