India's Quest for Green Energy: Kamuthi Solar Project

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EXCERPTS

INDIA’S SOLAR VISION 2022 AND INDIA’S SOLAR POTENTIAL

In 2016, about 35% of the population in India did not have access to power and India’s per capita consumption was just about 1,000 kWh/year whereas the global average was more than 3 times this figure. Given such disparity and India being an emerging economy, there was an urgent need felt to install power capacity at a rapid pace. India thus had planned to set up 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022 out of which 100GW was to be solar capacity. In 2016, the total installed power capacity of the country was 300 GW, out of which more than 70% was generated through non-renewable sources.

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CHALLENGES AND RISKS INVOLVED IN A UTILITY SCALE SOLAR POWER PLANT

Though utility scale power plants promised to save costs, there were other underlying challenges in setting up such plants. The first was the high cost of land acquisition; decentralized solar power could be set up on rooftops or small land areas but centralized solar power needed a huge land area. Adani bypassed this issue by taking the land on a lease for 25 years...

PROJECT PARAMETERS AND DESIGN ASPECTS

The Kamuthi power project was based on PV or Photo Voltaic technology. The key deliverable of the Kamuthi project was to generate 648 MW of power and feed it to the state grid throughout the day via two 230 Kilovolt (kV) and three 110 kV switchyards...

PROJECT PARTNER: ABB

A utility scale power plant needed to have a robust electrical system and automation to monitor the plant. Such systems would ensure grid compliance and performance monitoring, as well as run the plant at maximum efficiency...

PROJECT STEPS

The site was spread over 2500 acres of land with around 1300 acres of panel area. The project was made up of 5 plants at a single location. A project of such a scale demanded 38000 foundations, 25 million solar modules, 27,000 metric tons of structure, 576 inverters, 154 transformers, and 6,000 km of cables. Kamuthi was a remote location and so it was a logistical challenge to move the required components to the construction site...

SUMMARY

The Kamuthi project was considered as a tremendous success owing to its scale and the record time within which it was completed....

EXHIBITS

Exhibit I: Other Important Solar Power Installations.

Exhibit II: Installed Power Generation Capacity in India through different sources as of March 2016.

Exhibit III: India’s Solar Insolation.

Exhibit IV: Global installation of solar power in MW and price per MW of solar panel installation over the years in USD.