With an aim to help India increase its power generation capacity through cleaner, renewable energy sources, the union government and World Bank have signed a $98 million loan pact along with a $2 million grant agreement. Under the agreement, the Shared Infrastructure for Solar Parks Project will finance the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) to provide sub-loans to states to invest in various solar parks.
The IREDA will utilise the funding under this project to develop the common infrastructure such as power pooling substations, intra-park transmission infrastructure and provide access to roads, water supply and drainage. While some states intend to provide a full range of infrastructure services to the selected private or public sector developers, others plan to provide only pooling stations to facilitate internal evacuation. The solar parks will be mostly under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energys (MNRE) Solar Park Scheme. The first two solar parks are in the Rewa and Mandsaur districts of Madhya Pradesh, with targeted installed capacities of 750 MW and 250 MW respectively. Other states where potential solar parks could be supported under this project are in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Haryana.
This project will help establish large-scale solar parks and support the government’s plan to install 100 gigawatts (GW) of solar power out of a total renewable-energy target of 175 GW by 2022. The government is committed to set-up an enabling environment for solar technology penetration in the country. With about 331 GW of installed capacity, India's power system is among the largest in the world. Yet, the per capita electricity consumption is less than one-third of the global average.