Power From 'Solar Grid"

The most attractive and fascinating features of solar energy are its omnipresence and that it is available for free. The current photo voltaic solar cell may work only with just about 17 per cent to 18 per cent efficiency but what matters is its ability to transform solar energy into usable electrical power from a ‘free non-polluting’ energy source.

Currently PV Solar is indeed the best option since no better technology breakthrough is in sight usable on a mass scale for the next few years.
he credit therefore goes to the current government for taking a bold initiative and setting an ambitious target of 2500 megawatts of solar electric Power by 2012 and 20000 megawatts by 2020. The primary aim of Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) is to speedily augment inadequate electrical power hurting our inclusive development.
The Sun delivers more energy to the earth in one hour than what the world currently uses in a year! Therefore, it is our innovation in structuring policies that will enable us to realise our dream of extending productive life of our rural folks that today sadly ends with sunset.
Power Shortage Blues:
The people worst affected by power shortage and its quality from the copper grid are people in smaller towns and those in rural regions like farmers, artisans and their children. Working people suffer from productivity loss since rural economic activity currently stops at sunset and thereby each rural household loses close to 15 man-hours each day. Children also suffer since they can’t study at night or learn by watching television. Women suffer due to their inability to get informed from a wide variety of info-entertainment available non-stop via television.

Solar power can correct this since, unlike a copper grid, a solar Grid is available even in deep hinterlands. Only right policies from the government will allow us to use the solar grid to achieve inclusive development rather than waiting for the copper grid that indeed is a long term project with its associated operational delays.

Unfortunately however, our objective to improve power reliability and quality in small towns will not be realised unless the current policy undergoes important changes in order to quickly exploit and benefit from omnipresent “Solar Grid” to augment weakest links in the “Copper Grid”. For realising immediate rural productivity gains the current policy needs a modification.

With this change we can quickly meet the mission objective to make available stable, reliable and uninterrupted power to a vast population that lives outside metros and big cities. Let us examine why in depth.

Policy Lacunae:
The current policy allows only large solar energy plants of over one megawatt capacity to feed power into a 33kV grid. This portion of the grid basically is a ‘low impedance node’ and therefore has more stable power than the power available in small towns and fringe rural areas served from 3.3KV and a lower voltage grid primarily since these have high line impedance.

The feeder capacity is mostly inadequate as one goes down to 440V feeders. Most huge losses of power in the grid are at these fag end delivery points. An impedance analysis of the power grid done by the IEEE reveals that injecting alternative power at high impedance nodes improves the resultant power quality than feeding solar power at low impedance nodes.