India has done a remarkable job in terms of deployment of renewable energy-based installations, growing almost 3.5 folds in the last 5–6 years, with most of the capacity coming from onshore wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) based installations. At present India’s grid-connected solar PV sector is majorly dominated by the ground-based installations (93%1) while the balance is contributed by rooftop the based solar PV installations. The installation cost of utility-scale solar PV in the country has declined by 84%2 between 2010-2018, making India world’s topmost country in achieving the lowest installation cost for utility- scale solar PV. It is well know that solar PV deployment is quite land intensive and scaling up the project sizes requires large chunk of contiguous land parcels, which becomes challenging in many situations. In order to keep pace of development commensurate with the national targets for solar capacity additions, alternatives are required to be explored and established. Floating solar PV (FSPV) or floatovoltaics is one such alternative, which has started getting traction worldwide and is expected to grow strongly over the coming years.

It is estimated that the annual capacity addition may rise from the current installed of 1.314 GWp in 2018 to 4.6 GWp by 2022. Presently, China is the leading international market followed by Japan and South Korea. India also has very bright prospects to develop FSPV projects due to availability of large water bodies.

As a technology, FSPV is in a very early stage of development in India. Till now, only a few projects with cumulative capacity of 2.7 MW have been installed. However, over 1.7 GW capacity projects are reported to be in various stages of development. FSPV market appears to inch forward to make its presence felt in India and the tariffs discovered through bids have already shown rapid reductions. So far large-to-medium size man-made inland waterbodies seems to have attracted initial interest to install FSPV based power plants, but all these waterbodies were created to serve various purposes like – irrigation, water supply, fishing, hydroelectric, navigation, etc., and this warrants great deal of diligence to balance out various usages of these waterbodies on the basis of accurate information.