Image Courtesy: ibtimes
India takes a leaf out of Europe in a new solar power generation plan that could revolutionalize power generation and transmission besides playing a pivotal role in cutting harmful emissions. Himachal Pradesh’s new HP Solar Power Policy 2016 could be a path breaker in solar power generation. Based on the new policy you could generate power and sell it to the government if you have a surplus of power at a pre-defined rate.
The Scheme itself
The electricity consumers of HPSEBL shall be eligible to install minimum 1 KW to maximum 5 MW capacity solar PV plants on their building roof top or its premises, which will be connected to the grid. The presence swathes of wasteland have buoyed the estimates of solar power generation from various bodies. For instance, National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) has estimated a potential of 34 GW taking into account 3% of total wasteland and roof top surface areas of the consumers for this purpose. IREDA has estimated a potential of about 53 GW taking into account 5% of the wasteland.
Centre – State scheme that compliments well
The state will exploit a government of India (GoI) scheme provides equity contribution of Rs 50 lakh per MW, the state will also encourage farmers and unemployed youth to set up projects in a distributed and dispersed manner from 500 KW to 5 MW. All this is expected to create 84 MW, as per GoI.
Example from the west
Individual markets, like Denmark, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, for example, they are comprised almost entirely of residential and commercial installations. In the United State’s in the sate of Maine, there is a practice where customers with solar panels pay only for the “net” amount of electricity they buy each month, that is, what they consume minus what they generate. Homeowners who generate more electricity than they consume receive a credit toward future bills.
The Logical Indian applauds the government, both the state and center to be working towards enhancing solar power and emulating some of the best examples from the west. Like the examples from the west, we request the government to keep in mind the challenges which come along wrt establishing a sustainable solar market. We hope this initiative is widely encouraged in India and collectively we could fight global warming by doing our small bit in changing the means by which we generate power.
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