Thursday, February 13, 2014: A research published on the online variant of the international journal, Smart Grid and Renewable Energy, proposes that the Indian farmers can use their land for multiple uses other than agriculture. the announcement was made on 11 February. This study was done by Tirumalachetty Harinarayana, director of the Gujarat Energy Research and Management Institute Research Centre in Gandhinagar, and Vasavi Kamili, a student of the Medha Engineering College in Hyderabad.
In an IANS report, Harinarayana said that they proposes to farmers to grow different foodgrains, and at the same time produce power. The power generation can be easily done by laying a roof of suitably configured photovoltaic solar panels on the agriculture land to generate electricity from sunlight.
This solar power which will be produced, can be used for various purposes like pumping water for irrigation. While, any extra electric energy that is generated can be made available to the nearest power grid via purchase.
This will empower the farmers to compensate further income. They can either rent their land to the government or to a solar developer who will construct the solar panels and generate energy. Meanwhile, they can grow food crops in regular practice over the same land.
The scientists found this proposal executable, after computer modelling studies showed that solar roof has no adverse impact on the growth of crops. Their studies show that a set of PV panels placed at a height of five metres above the land and arranged in a manner of a chess board (with gaps in between) is a successive way to implement the system. They further claim that the PV Panels will help the crops fruit better. As the small reduction of sunlight, reducing the direct impact of the ultraviolet radiation in the sunlight is favourable.
They mentioned the PV roof cover on a four-lane 205 km Ahmedabad-Rajkot highway can generate 104 MW of power. And, the Ahmedabad-Vadodara highway (93 km) can generate 61 MW of electricity if covered in PV panels.
The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission governs the solar farms and solar parks planned to be set up in India.
