India’s targets of 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022, and 40% generation capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030 will require a rapid and dramatic increase in solar and wind capacity deployment and overcoming its associated economic, siting, and power system challenges. The objective of this study was to spatially identify the amount and quality of wind and utility-scale solar resource potential in India, and the possible siting-related constraints and opportunities for development of renewable resources. Using the Multi-criteria Analysis for Planning Renewable Energy (MapRE) methodological framework, we estimated several criteria valuable for the selection of sites for development for each identified potential "zone", such as the levelized cost of electricity, distance to nearest substation, capacity value (or the temporal matching of renewable energy generation to demand), and the type of land cover. We find that high quality resources are spatially heterogeneous across India, with most wind and solar resources concentrated in the southern and western states, and the northern state of Rajasthan. Assuming India's Central Electricity Regulatory Commission's norms, we find that the range of levelized costs of generation of wind and solar PV resources overlap, but concentrated solar power (CSP) resources can be approximately twice as
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