How Open Source Empowers Solar Innovation in India: A Developer’s Perspective

India’s solar journey depends not only on better panels and hardware but also on accessible, transparent, and community-driven software tools. In this session, I will discuss how developers can create useful tools that support the nation's renewable energy goals through the use of open-source libraries, open datasets, and collaborative development practices.

The talk is based on my experience working on solar estimation projects using open-source tools like SunCalc for sun-position and shadow simulation, and pvlib for solar modelling. I'll go over how these tools can be integrated to create a workable pipeline for calculating rooftop solar potential in Indian cities.

This session will cover:

• Why open-source is essential for trustworthy solar potential analysis

• How open datasets (building footprints, weather data) enable scalable modelling

• A step-by-step breakdown of a reproducible solar estimation pipeline

• Designing a modular architecture using only FOSS components

• Challenges encountered while working with Indian datasets and rooftops

• How contributors can improve documentation, data quality, visualizations, and algorithms

By the end of this session, participants will see how FOSS tools can empower India’s renewable-energy ecosystem and how they can meaningfully contribute to open-source energy and civic-tech projects.

• Understand how FOSS tools can be used to model and analyse solar potential

• Learn how open datasets support transparent and reproducible solar computations

• Gain a practical architecture for building solar estimation workflows using open-source components

• Discover opportunities to contribute to open-source energy-tech projects

• Recognize how open-source accelerates climate-tech innovation in India

• Learn practical lessons from applying FOSS in real solar and civic-tech projects