Colleges in Karnataka are evincing interest in setting up rooftop solar systems to meet their captive power demands.
Karantaka's nodal agency to facilitate the development of non-conventional energy, Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Ltd (KREDL), is working with colleges to help set up the rooftop solar systems.
“The power generated from the rooftop solar systems can be used to captive consumption and the rest can be sold to the grid,” Mr N.S. Prasanna Kumar, Managing Director, KREDL, told
“Colleges have captive consumption of about 750 KW of power and also have large rooftops, so they can set up projects of 1MW or 2 MW and harness solar power,” he pointed out.
The colleges can work in collaboration with solar developers to set up systems, and can chose to work on different financing models to set up the system, Mr Kumar said.
According to him, in cases where the entire system is funded by the developer, colleges can purchase the power from the developer and KREDL will have a 25-year PPA (power purchase agreement) to purchase excess power.
“If the developer opts out of the PPA and prefers to sell it to a third-party buyer, the power should be supplied free-of-cost to the college,” Mr Kumar said.
Another model could be where the college invests part of the money for the system and gets a 30 per cent funding from MNRE, he added.
It would typically cost about Rs 200/watt, which converts into about Rs 20 lakh for a 10 kW system, to generate about 40 units of green power a day.
According to Mr Kumar, St Johns College, Bangalore has set up a 100 KW system and several other colleges such as Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering are keen on setting up systems like these.
These efforts by KREDL are in sync with the national aim to have distributed solar power systems across the country apart from grid connected solar projects, so as to enable individual households, office buildings and academic institutions to generate and consume captive power.
As part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, the country aims at reaching 1000 MW by 2017 and 2000 MW by 2022 from off grid applications.