MEIL Green Power Limited has commissioned a 50 MW Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Project farm at Pamidi in Ananthapur District of Andhra Pradesh.

MGPL, a unit of Megha Engineering & Infrastructures Ltd., Hyderabad, has invested Rs 848 crore on the project set up on a 600-acre site located about 350 km from Hyderabad.

Uma Maheshwar Raddy, Associate Vice-President of MEIL, said the company expects to generate revenues of about Rs 110 crore per annum from the solar plant.

"Having taken up the EPC works for this project, we have taken several other solar EPC contracts in the country," he said.

This is the largest Solar Thermal Power Project in southern India, the company official said.

This power is expected to reduce about 80 thousand tonnes of carbon emissions every year.

The solar power project mandate was awarded to the company under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission for a capacity of 50 MW out of the total of 470 MW by NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam planned under the JNNSM scheme.

The CSP plant utilises parabolic trough collectors and uses energy from the Sun to generate heat, which gets transferred to turbines for power generation.

The plant is expected to generate 110 million units of solar power and supplies it at Rs 11 per unit. As per the arrangement, the power would be supplied to NTPC arm, which in turn supplies 440 million units of thermal power from Central unallocated power along with solar power to Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

(The writer was at the solar plant site on the invitation of the company.)

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