G V Joshi
One of the first major Solar Power related policy announcements from the new BJP Government has been on establishment of Solar Parks
The Central Government has proposed to establish 25 Solar Parks, each with a capacity of 500 MW and above with a target of over 20,000 MW of solar power installed capacity over a period of next 4 years.
This scheme is expected to entail an investment of Rs.4, 050 crore. 12 States – Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Meghalaya, Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Odisha – have so far given consent for building Solar Parks.
According to experts in solar energy, India has developed enough talent over the past 5 years to execute solar projects rapidly. It is not something which is difficult.
What is a Solar Park? A Solar Park, also known as a photovoltaic power station in an engineer’s vocabulary, is a large-scale photovoltaic system (PV) designed for the supply of electricity into the main electricity grid from thermal/hydro / nuclear power stations.
They are sometimes also referred to as solar farms especially when sited in agricultural areas.
The Solar Park uses photovoltaic effect, which for a common man means producing electricity in a material upon exposure to any light but generally light from our Sun. The photovoltaic effect was first observed by French physicist A. E. Becquerel in 1839. A photovoltaic cell or solar cell is an electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity . Solar cells are the building blocks of photovoltaic modules, otherwise known as solar panels.
In 1883 Charles Fritts built the first solar cell by coating the selenium with a thin layer of gold to form the junctions; the device was only around 1 % efficient.
The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated on 25 April 19 54 at Bell Laboratories, research wing of American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T). The inventors were Daryl Chapin, Calvin Souther Fuller and Gerald Pearson. It was only six percent efficient. Since then efficiency has been going up steadily.
By 1960 the efficiency had reached 10 per cent. By 1985 the figure had crossed 20 per cent
What is solar cell efficiency? Solar cell efficiency is the ratio of the electrical output of a solar cell to the incident energy in the. form of sunlight. It is the percentage of the solar energy to which the cell is exposed that is converted into electrical energy.
Efficiency continued to go up and the prices continued to drop. The price of solar panels fell steadily for the next 4Q years.
In September 2013, a solar cell achieved a new laboratory record with 44.7 percent efficiency, as demonstrated by the German Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems.
A team from the University of New South Wales in Australia has achieved a record 40.4 per cent conversion efficiency by using standard solar cells combined with a mirror and filters.
But these are achieved in research laboratories only. Solar cell energy conversion efficiencies for commercially available solar cells are only around 14-19%.
The first 1 MW solar parks was built by Arco Solar at Lugo near Hesperia, California , USA at the end of 1982. It was Jollowed in 1984 by a 5:1 MW installation in Carrizo Plain also in California. Both have since been decommission,d, though Carrizo Plain is the site for several large plants now being constructed or planned Solar parks generally use unusable barren land. Those are the lands that are not used for agriculture and located away from cities.
The idea of setting up large scale solar power plants in the wastelands of various parts of the country was first put in motion in November 2013 by the previous Congress led Government.
India’s first Solar Park came up at Charanka village in Gujarat in April 2012. Spread over close to 5,500 acres of unused land in the District of Patan in Gujarat.
“Charanka Solar Park” was developed by Gujar:at Power Corporation Ltd (GPCL) under the State Government’s solar power policy. The estimated capacity of the plant is 590 Mw, and ac- cording to GPCL, a total of 224 MW has so far been commissioned by 20 developers.
Most of the projects were commissioned dur- ing the first half of 2012. In addition the park also has the capacity to generate 100 MW of Wind Power and is considered a good model for solar-wind hybrid Park
The Dhirubhai Ambani Solar Park at Dhursar village near Pokhran in the Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan is one of a large number of solar parks expected to be built in a 35,000 km2 area of the That Desert that has been reserved for solar power projects.
The solar park was named after the late Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder of Reliance Indus tries, and was constructed using 500,000 modules by First Solar, and covers an area of 140 hectares. India has a target of developing 22,000 MW of solar power plants, and an additional 8,000 MW is expected in local generation, bringing the total to 30,000 MW by 2022.
There are about fifteen solar cell manufacturers in India. They can manufacture solar panels producing about 1400 megawatts of electricity per year.
More than 85% of the solar cells used today are made from crystalline silicon, but scientific research continues to find new materials that could do the job better.
Research on discovering new materials and achieving higher efficiency is going on throughout the world. There’s a lot of excitement about a class of materials called perovskites that promise to deliver efficient and cheap solar cells. There are predictions that the efficiencies could reach 50%, and the costs could faIl.
It is time Indian scientists should take up research on devdoping cheap and more efficient solar cells. Solar Parks have many advantages: no moving parts, long lifetimes, little maintenance, and no fuel needs. But they also have drawbacks. They do not function on cloudy/rainy days and an alternative system like wind power or conventional hydro / thermal power through national or state power grid is needed. And this can happen for a long stretch lasting up to a week at times in coastal states of India during monsoon season which lasts for 3 to 4 months.
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