Solar Parks

Regions across India are carving their green legacy with distinct contributions to the solar and wind energy landscape.

Hungarian company SolServices has published a white paper outlining ways to make solar farms more compatible with nature and wildlife, from insects and amphibians to birds, bats, rodents and big game.

New modeling suggests that the reduction in albedo caused by large-scale solar plants could double rainfall in the Red Sea coastal plain of Saudi Arabia.

The move is aimed at identifying chunks of land for solar plants and solar parks as the State government looks into the possibility of developing more capacity in the state and further increasing its ‘37.5 GW by 2024-25’ renewable energy generation target.

Solar pioneer Philip Wolfe looks at areas where solar generating stations are clustered together, without the coordination of organised solar parks.

A Dutch research group has shown that south-oriented solar parks offer better environmental conditions for soil and vegetation than east-west oriented facilities. According to their findings, a distance between panel rows of at least 1.5 times panel height is crucial to favor ideal plant growth and soil functioning.

Solar energy pioneer and founder of Wiki-Solar, Philip Wolfe updates his series of blogs on the world’s largest solar power stations, first published in pv magazine in 2019. At that time, there were no single solar power plants over 1 GWAC. The record now is 2.2 GWAC.

Researchers from the TNO in the Netherlands have proposed two novel east-west PV plant designs that are claimed to increase soil quality underneath the solar panels. Both approaches are said to provide a 77% ground coverage ratio, which compares to a 90% ratio in conventional east-west oriented projects.

Enel Green Power is combining existing PV arrays with agriculture at nine pilot sites in Europe. pv magazine recently spoke to Giovanni Tula, the company’s head of sustainability, about the business model and its replicability.

Today, the State has 5042 MW of renewable energy capacity, a ten-fold increase from 491 MW in 2012.