The new State of Telangana is facing an acute power crises. Industries are having power holidays of up to 1 or 2 days a week. The State wants to attract Industries for the development of the backward areas and maintain the growth of the IT industry in Hitec City and Hyderabad. AnMoU has been signed with Chattisgarh Government for supply of 1000MW which is will be available only after 3 years. Telangana has recently allotted 500MW of solar power development to various Companies and these projects would be ready in about one year. The new power projects under development are the 1200 MW power plant of Singareni (600 MW will be operational by mid-2015) and Bhupalpally power plant will supply 600 MW around the same time. Telangana state will get 300 MW power from Central Generating Stations (CGS). All put together it will be 1,500 MW by June next and by the end of 2015, another 600 MW from Singareni will be added. Against the average daily demand of around 6000MW, the peak load demands range from 6500MW to 7300MW on certain days. Does Telangana need base load power generation capacity or does it need solar power plants that are ideal for meeting peak load demand? What more can be done and how can this crisis be tackled?
CII's Telangana State Council desired a "Renewable Energy Roadmap for meeting the increasing power requirements of Telangana". DV Satya Kumar, MD, Shri Shakti Alternative Energy Ltd prepared presentation for 'Harnessing Solar Energy in Telangana' against the background perspectives of International Energy Agency's (IEA) Solar PV Roadmap 2014 and Government of India's JNNSM 2.0 wherein a revised target of 100GW by 2022 has been set increasing the earlier target of 20GW by five times.
The presentation highlights the long term potential of solar power and its distributed nature whereby the power generation can be taken to the load centre making solar ideal for meeting the demands of agricultural pumpsets. The timing of generation from solar meets the irrigation needs of farmers as there is no need to operate pumpsets during monsoon when the solar generation is at its lowest. Synergizing solar for agricultural pumpsets and for Rooftop solar systems are important elements of the suggested Roadmap besides utility scale power plants for which Telangana has a potential of 20GW using only 3% of the wastelands. Utilizing solar in a big way for power generation is also an important way to tackle the Climate Change Challenge for which it is important to limit carbon emissions to limit the global temperature increase to under 2 deg C to avoid disastrous consequences of global warming as per IPCC's latest 5th Assessment Report. The IEA estimates a scenario wherein 16% of global power requirements can be met by solar PV and about 22% in India. With the abundant solar resource in Telangana, surely 25% to 30% power generated can come from solar to tackle the long term supply demand challenges and to meet the distributed power requirements of 19.19 lakhs farmers using pumpsets.
