India Proposes Advanced Solar Technology Demo Configurations

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--India's Maharashtra State Power Generating Company Limited (MAHAGENCO) (Mumbai), the state power generation company of Maharashtra, has received the government's go-ahead to construct a 150-megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic (PV) project at Shivajinagar, in the Dhule district. The project is claimed to be the largest solar PV project in the world and is scheduled to begin operating in March 2012. Cristline technology will produce 100 MW of the project's power, and the 50-MW balance will be produced from thin-film technology.

The state government will have a 20% equity stake in the Dhule project and in two other proposed projects of 1 MW and 4 MW in Chandrapur. The state government will fund $88 million of the $441 million total cost of the three projects, and German banking group KFW (Frankfurt) will provide the balance.

As new solar projects such as the Dhule PV facility enter the project pipeline in India's Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM), which is targeting grid parity and 20,000 MW of solar by 2022, India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has published proposed technology configurations for grid-connected solar demonstration projects. The intention is to set up these projects based on advanced technology configurations to make solar power cost-effective through increased efficiency and capacity utilization factors, and achieve parity with grid power costs target.

The proposed configurations are:

• up to 50 MW capacity with air/hybrid cooling, with a minimum capacity of 20 MW
• 50 MW of capacity with up to 30% gas hybridization
• 50 MW of capacity with operating temperatures of more than 500 degrees Celsius
• solar augmentation of an existing coal thermal power plant
• a solar-biomass hybrid plant with 1 to 3 MW capacity
• a base-load capacity solar standalone plant of up to 10 MW capacity and a minimum capacity of 3 MW

The MNRE is planning to set up about 10 power plants with project developers. Projects will be awarded on case bidding. The project based on solar augmentation with an existing solar plant will be awarded once a coal power plant has been identified. The project developer will be required to indicate the performance benchmark/baseline against which the plant has been configured. Key technical performance parameters of the plant will be required to be provided by the project developer for making data available in the public domain.

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