Private firms investing heavily in solar power
Sunborne Energy, a utility scale solar power producer working towards providing low-cost utility solar energy, has signed an MoU with Gujarat to build a 15 MW solar PV project in Gujarat.
It is also coming up with two 50 MW solar power projects in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan and hope to have them included under the solar mission so that they can avail of the incentives being offered. The company will invest `2,000 crore in their Andhra Pradesh project. Aseem Sharma, CEO of Sunborne Energy pointed out, “We hope to become a major solar power developer in India. By 2017, we hope to develop 1GW of power and also have 200 MW of solar plants by 2014. We also hope to make solar power grid compatible very soon in order to be able to develop solar power at a competitive price.” Sunborne Energy is backed by General Catalyst Partners — a prominent US based private equity funds with assets in excess of $1.7 billion. Dr Manuel Romero Alvarex, technology advisor of Sunborne Energy has been actively involved with promoting solar energy in Spain. “Spain launched it first commercial solo power platform three years ago. They key issue then was reliability but presently they are constructing 60 plants at a cost 60 billion euros.”
Remero Alvarex, ex-director of the Solar Energy Research & Development at CIEMAT Spain, expects production costs of solar energy to come down by 60 per cent in the next three years. He also expects the cost of photo voltaics to fall by another 40 per cent thereby allowing solar to achieve grid parity.
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