The Indian Railways is ready to commence production from its largest solar plant at Bhilai in Chhattisgarh.
The Railways’ second solar photovoltaic plant, the 50-megawatt (MW) facility follows the 1.7 MW unit commissioned in February 2022 at Bina in Madhya Pradesh.
The Raipur Division of the South East Central Railway (SECR) zone installed a solar plant spanning across 200 acres at Charoda near a national highway in Bhilai as part of the Railways’ strategy to solarise the rail network by utilising its vacant lands for renewable energy projects.
The plant with 1,54,500 solar photovoltaic panels installed, underwent two trials in May and June this year. The Railway Board will now take a call on how to use the solar output — whether to feed traction power for Indian Railways or for commercial purposes.
The project has been developed by Chennai-based Sherisha Rooftop Solar SPV that will operate the solar facility for over two-decades.
“It is the biggest solar plant of Indian Railways. Such projects are aimed towards making the Indian Railways green. Efforts are on towards reducing the carbon footprint by further augmenting the use of renewable energy with setting-up more solar plants in different regions by the Railways,” said Vipin Vaishnav, senior divisional commercial manager, Raipur Railway Division.
Net Zero
Indian Railways, the fourth largest railways in the world by network, has envisioned to become a green transporter by reducing its carbon footprint.
The objective is to minimise the use of coal and electricity from thermal power plants. With the vision of becoming green transporter with zero carbon emission, Indian Railways has envisioned to implement 30 GW of renewable energy power plants by 2030.
As part of this, rooftop solar panels have been installed across several railway stations in the country. Further, Indian Railways plans to harness about 500 MW of land-based solar power for traction purposes.
For this purpose, it has commissioned two pilot projects of 2 MW and 1.7 MW at Diwana in Haryana and Bina in Madhya Pradesh, respectively, on land along the railway track.
The 50 MW solar power at Bhilai which is likely to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is the third in series.
