Kerala Plans To Take Up Study To Solarise Public Buildings

Kerala Plans To Take Up Study To Solarise Public Buildings

The Kerala government has planned to solarise a large number of government buildings. It said that it has plans to solarise public buildings ranging from anganwdi centers to industrial units in the state. This comes at a time when the southern state has planned to become carbon neutral by 2050. The government said that it has planned to solarise all public buildings to set a ‘model’.

“There are more than 75000 electricity consumers in the State (the number of buildings will be in the range of 30,000 to 50,000) with a connected load of over 450 MW and an average annual consumption of 1100 MU of electricity. In order to complete this solarisation a detailed site survey needs to be conducted at the Local body level and also department-wise,” a tender document released by the Agency for New & Renewable Energy Research and Technology (ANERT) said.

Feasibility Study Of Public Buildings

To take concrete steps towards this, the state nodal agency has initiated the process of conducting feasibility studies of all these buildings. It recently also issued a tender regarding this.

“ANERT is seeking proposals from interested parties for conducting technical site feasibility Inspection in the Public Buildings across the State of Kerala for the installation of Solar Power Plants. The proposed power plants will be either grid-connected Solar Power plants with or without battery backup,” it said.

The agency said that it has developed a mobile application for conducting site survey & feasibility study of Government buildings. “The Site survey team should follow this mobile application for conducting feasibility study for all government buildings. The Training for the mobile app for conducting the site survey will be provided for the selected bidder. The physical site survey forms also need to be submitted for the release of payment,” it said.

ANERT had bids from Urjamitra centres, organizations, solar EPC contractors and others. The tendering process is now over and the state agency is preparing to take the survey work further to expedite the process.

Tales of other states

However, Kerala is now alone in the case. Several states like Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Punjab. However, most states have plans to solarise buildings in a phased manner or talks about partial coverage. However, Kerala has plans to solarise all of its public buildings.

On the other hand, states like Punjab have made the list of its public buildings with details of its rooftop solar capacity, status of its solarisation, and hurdles among others.