India's Biggest Floating Solar Power Plant To Come Up In Telangana By May: Here's All About It

India’s largest floating solar power plant of 100 MW capacity, belonging to the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), is expected to be commissioned at Ramagundam, Telangana in May this year, NTPC southern region executive director CV Anand said.

Details of the project

Addressing a virtual press conference in Hyderabad, Anand said the floating solar photo-voltaic project would be spread over 450 acres on the water surface of Sri Ram Sagar Project reservoir. This will be the largest floating solar plant in the country in a single location as of now. The total cost of the project would be ?423 crore, including GST, he said.

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“NTPC is utilising the water bodies and huge reservoirs to set up these floating solar units, because it requires huge expenditure for ground-mounted plant. For setting up one MW solar photo-voltaic plant on ground, we require five acres,” he said.

Other projects in progress

Being developed in Telangana by NTPC, the solar plant is all set to commission around 217 MW floating solar capacity in the next few months.?The other renewable energy plants that are likely to be commissioned this year are 92 MW floating unit at Kayamkulam gas plant in Kerala and 25 MW unit at Simhadri power plant.

“We are actually slightly delayed in implementing these floating solar projects due to the Coronavirus pandemic,” Anand said.??

NTPC is in the process of setting up around 450 MW of solar power capacity, of which 230 MW ground mounted solar power plant in Ettayapuram near Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu will be set up by 2022.

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The company would have already implemented these floating solar projects, it, however, got delayed due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Successful projects so far

Apart from this, the company which has a total installed capacity of about 9,125 MW of NTPC's total capacity of 64,880 MW, including joint ventures, is in the process of implementing two 800 MW coal-fired thermal power projects in Ramagundam. The phase-I of the project will be commissioned by January 2022 and the second phase by March 2022.

The company has successfully completed pilot projects in Kayamkulam of 100 kWh and Kawas of one MW and are now implementing larger projects.??