Tuesday, August 05, 2014: India is surely banking big on solar power. The country has plans to furnish low-cost loans and come up with solar power parks across the country to host about 20 GW of capacity, which is 10 times of what it has established to date.
Speaking about the initiative, Tarun Kapoor, joint-secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy said, “We’re preparing a scheme for solar parks and it will be out after cabinet approval in about one month.”
India is designing some of the world’s largest photovoltaic plants as it attempts to bring the costs down and promote generation. It aims at producing power from about four ultra-mega projects at a peak of Rs 5,500 megawatt-hour, which is 32 per cent below the global average, as per the data accumulated by Bloomberg.
The parks will have large plants ranging between 500 – 1,000 MW power, that will be affiliated to the grid. Government subsidies will maintain a very humble price of land within the parks, in order to control project costs, Kapoor said.
State utilities will be asked to purchase at least 20 per cent of the power rendered at the parks. Project owners will be free to sell and send the balance to consumers elsewhere in the country.
Apart from this, India plans to sell 1,500 MW of photovoltaic capacity in its biggest bid to date. The final guidelines will be published this month and the first 750 MW will be accoladed in bidding by the end of September, as stated by A.K. Maggu, general manager of state-run power trader NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam Ltd. The company is supervising the procedure.
