After solarising more than 960 stations, Indian Railways as part of its goal of becoming 100 per cent power-sufficient, has placed orders for 198 MW solar rooftop capacity for 550 stations which were under execution.
In order to achieve its objective of becoming fully self-sustainable for all its power needs, the Railways recently organised a meet of leading solar power developers to become “net zero carbon emitter” before 2030.
The country’s largest transporter is set to produce solar energy for meeting all it’s energy consumption needs of more than 33 billion units by 2030. The current annual requirement is about 20 billion units, an official statement said on Monday.
Indian Railways has a mega plan to install solar plants of 20 GW capacity by utilising its vacant land by 2030. Some of the stations solarised are Varanasi, New Delhi, Old Delhi, Jaipur, Secunderabad, Kolkata, Guwahati, Hyderabad, and Howrah.
About 51,000 hectare vacant land is available with Indian Railways, which is now ready to extend all support to the developers for installing solar power plants on Railway’s vacant un-encroached land.
Railways is also set to achieve 100 per cent electrification by the year 2023 and is committed to utilise solar energy for meeting its traction power requirement and become a complete ‘Green mode of transportation’ in line with the recent directive of the Prime Minister to solarise railway stations and utilise vacant railway land for Renewable Energy (RE) projects.
The use of solar power will accelerate the Railways’ mission to achieve the goal of becoming ”Net Zero Carbon Emission Railway”.
In order to achieve this, it has developed a mega plan for installing solar plants of 20 GW capacity by utilising its vacant land by 2030.
To begin with, bids for three GW solar projects on vacant Railway land parcels and land parcels along the railway track have already been invited by Railway Energy Management Company Ltd (REMCL), a PSU of Indian Railways. These solar projects, besides supplying power to Railways at reduced tariff, will also protect the Railway land by construction of boundary wall along the track.