Commercial & Industrial PV

Solar installation surged in the first quarter of 2021, with developers completing their delayed projects from last year.   

Packaging manufacturer Huhtamaki India chose Amplus Solar to install the rooftop solar capacity across its factories in Guwahati, Daman, Silvassa, and Taloja. The use of solar power from these plants will help the company avoid approximately 750 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum.

The Chattisgarh-headquartered integrated steel manufacturer will set up a solar power plant of 250 MW capacity in the Raigarh district. The electricity generated from the plant shall be utilized for the enhanced billet capacity at the company’s existing factory in the Raipur district.

Researchers led by the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi have projected the waste expected from end-of-life solar panels and related components. They assumed 347.5 GW of total installed solar generation capacity would be reached this decade. The academics said the waste would include critical metals worth around $645 trillion, 70% of which could be recovered.

The sheer volume of new power lines which will be required to accommodate the rising tide of solar installations ensures copper has been included by the International Energy Agency on its list of minerals which must keep flowing if the energy transition is to stay on course. And it’s not production that’s the potential bottleneck.

A prototype of a cement-based battery has been developed in Sweden for potential applications in buildings. Its creators claim it could become a solution to store electricity from rooftop PV and they do not exclude that it could also be used for the storage of large-scale renewables.

The nation maintained the highest score of 62.7 for solar in the latest edition of Ernst & Young’s renewables attractiveness index. It ranked third for overall renewable energy investment. 

The 14.7 MWp project, developed for Southern Petrochemical Industries Corporation (SPIC) Limited, uses an aggregate 37,632 number of 390Wp PV panels and spans an area of 15.6 hectares.

According to the International Energy Agency, most of the global reductions in CO2 emissions between now and 2030 would come from technologies available today. In a recent report, the agency sets what it described as a “cost-effective and economically productive” pathway resulting in an energy economy “dominated by renewables like solar and wind.”