The newly set up solar corporation of India intends to set up solar power units and power plants with good network and association with various research and academic institutions to procreate technologies and products significant to India, reports IANS.
The corporation is planning to set up ‘demonstration plants’ say, of 5MW of two or three configurations in a solar park and collect the data to scaling them up. The solar park is not open for research and development institutes and organisation said,Anil Kakodkar, chairman of Corporation
Kakodakar said the coorperation will be setting up solar power plants of its own. “We are looking at concentrated photo voltaic plants while there are other options also,” said the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
The Corporation is thinking of MW-scale plants, of say, 5 MW, that would adopt global available solar technologies to suit Indian conditions. The first of such plants could come up near an existing R&D centre with sufficient human resources to tap, Dr Kakodkar said, without giving more details.
He said that the objective would be to bring down costs so that solar power is not costlier than conventional power.
Asked for examples of technologies that he had in mind, Dr Kakodkar mentioned variants of concentrated solar power and dust-control innovations.
He noted that it is possible to have large solar collectors on which sun’s rays would fall, then move along the plane of the collectors and finally be gathered into a PV module. Another variant of CPV that he described was like a combination of tower and PV-mirrors would reflect sunlight on to a reflector on a tower which would in turn beam the rays back on to a PV panel on the ground.
Dr Kakodkar, a nuclear scientist, who headed the Atomic Energy Commission a few years ago, drew a parallel between such solar technologies that could be indigenously developed, and the ‘pressurised heavy water reactors’ that India developed and became masters in, in the atomic energy field. He said the growth of solar technology in India will be similar to the growth of nuclear reactor in the country, that is, choosing relevant technology for the country and bringing down its cost.
