Hotspots In India For The Solar Energy

The amount of solar energy received by the Earth in 1 hr. is more than the yearly world energy consumption and interruption distribution is non-uniform. Solar energy can be directly or indirectly transformed into electricity by the resources of numerous techniques. Out of them, concentrated solar power with its many arrangements of solar photovoltaic (PV) with diversity of materials can harvest significant amount of electricity. PV cell is an electrical device that changes the energy of sunlight directly into the electricity by photovoltaic effect.

There are many materials which are studied for solar PV applications. Different geometries of the solar cell devices are also studied to increase the overall quantum efficiency of the solar cell devices.

Availability of solar energy

The availability of Solar radiation is the key for establishing the solar power for use in rural India. It is well known that India is the 7th largest country in the world due to which it can be considered rich in solar profile due to its landmass of 2.

9 million km. The average global horizontal irradiance of solar radiation is around 5.0 -5.5 KWh/m2/Day while the average direct normal irradiance is around 4.5-5.0 KWh/m2/Day in most of the Indian states. Moreover, this much of solar energy is sufficient to produce around 6,081,709 TWh/year, which puts India in the list of top five countries of the world [1]. After the analysis of all these figures, it is observed that there are many regions which receive solar radiation of more than 5 kWh/m2/Day and thus make these regions solar hotspots in India for the solar energy generation specifically for rural India.

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It is mentioned in one of the literatures report the Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, Gangetic plains, Thar deserts, and Gujarat plains may be considered the solar hotspots in India which covers around 58% of the total land mass (~ 1.89 million kms of the total area) [2].

Availability of wasteland

Land availability considered as an important parameter for utility-scale power generation referred to as solar land. A solar utility-scale solar power plant has large land use energy intensity as compared to fossil-based power plant [3]. For setting up a solar power plant of more than 20 MWac capacity around 7.9 Acres/MW of total land area is required [4]. Ample amount of wasteland is available in the India which can be used for installation and development of utility-scale solar power plant. Developing a utility-scale solar power plant on wasteland doesn’t create any environmental pressure on agricultural systems because wasteland is neither fit for residential purpose nor for any type of agriculture purpose. Sacristy of wasteland causing many problems to many Mediterranean countries. They are facing environmental pressure on their agricultural land due to ground-mounted photovoltaic installations. The National Remote Sensing Centre has analysed the land of India and by analyzing that at last it has been found that around 46.7 million hectares of wasteland are available in India. Aggregation of land may be an execution challenge, but we are not considering that as a limiting factor to calculate the theoretical potential. Moreover, India has a significant amount of wasteland available.

Minimum dependency of solar installations on external cost

In India, the effect of external costs (installation time, fuel supply risk, water consumption, pollution and currency exchange rate) in solar power generation is minimum as compared to conventional power sources which are another advantage for solar power developers in setting up a large utility-scale power plant. The average cost of various types of electricity generation and to quantify some of the external costs. Some forms of power generation have very significant external costs to the community and the economy but solar power has more merits in comparison to other sources of power.