OREANDA-NEWS. July 11, 2011. Tata BP Solar, a joint venture of Tata Power and BP Solar, has lived up to its reputation as the pioneer and market leader in India and is the first company to have installed and commissioned a megawatt-scale solar power plant under the Rooftop and Other Small Solar Power Generation Plant scheme administered by the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM). This landmark project is owned and developed by B&G Solar at Komal West Village, Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu. The one-megawatt plant was synchronised to the grid on June 10, 2011, which is a good three months ahead of the scheduled date of start of September 16, 2011.

Commenting on this momentous occasion, K Subramanya, CEO, Tata BP Solar, said: “This is a milestone in the rapidly developing Indian solar story. The Tata BP Solar team as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor worked hard and in tandem with the B&G Solar team to achieve completion of the project well ahead of time. The plant was put up in a record time of 150 days.”

This project uses 4,400 crystalline silicon modules of 230 watts each spread out over an area of 5.5 acres. These modules will generate electric current when solar radiation falls on them. This direct current (DC) electricity will be converted to alternating current (AC) through inverters and upgraded to 11kV via transformers so that it is fed into the electricity grid lines of Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB) at 11kV. The solar power plant will generate 1.49 million units of electricity per year. Tata BP Solar has also taken the contract to provide the operation and maintenance services to the plant for the first 10 years after commissioning. The plant is designed to run for 25 years and the crystalline silicon modules manufactured and supplied by Tata BP Solar are guaranteed to perform for this period of 25 years with minimal degradation in the power output over the long lifetime. B&G Solar has signed a power purchase agreement with TNEB for 25 years to supply this power to them.

V Bhaktavatsalam, chairman, B&G Solar, stated: “I am delighted to be the first one to commission the solar plant out of a total of 80 such plants totalling 100 megawatts coming up all over India under the rooftop solar plants scheme of the IREDA. I look forward to the other such plants coming up in the country in the next few months.”

Tata BP Solar has been able to secure the largest number of EPC contracts in the IREDA-run scheme and is currently executing around 15 such projects in different parts of India including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan.

The JNNSM is a flagship project of the Indian Government to mainstream the use of solar energy and has galvanised the industry by setting out an ambitious target of installing 20,000MW of grid-connected solar power generation capacity by 2022 in addition to 2,000MW of off-grid solar power. Out of this, 1,100MW grid-connected solar power capacity is to be installed in the first phase ending in March 2013. Nearly 800MW of this has already been allocated and is currently under execution.