Solar and Wind mixed use Farms policy in India

While most of the large countries have separate polices for the development of wind and solar resources in the country now, there is no country which has a policy to promote the development of a hybrid solar wind mixed use farms. India has an ambitious target to develop 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022, out of which around 90% will come from solar and wind energy. While the Indian government has implemented numerous initiatives and policies such as solar park, rooftop solar and offshore wind polices, it is for the first time that is trying to build a framework where both solar panels and wind turbines can be installed at the same place.

Read more about Wind Power in India.

There are many synergies to wind and solar generation. While solar panels generate power mostly during the day, wind turbines can generate power at any time (not necessarily day time), depending on the wind speeds. This will help in reducing the need for additional investments into the grid infrastructure to negate the effects of the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy generation. A combined wind and solar farm generation will have a better round the clock availability than pure play wind and solar farms alone.

Here is a list of World’s 8 largest Solar Farms.

The other big advantage of these hybrid farms will be the savings on land costs. In India, land costs are quite high compared to other costs such as labor and equipment. This makes it useful to optimize the usage of land. Solar panels can be installed in the areas between the wind turbines, which are generally going to waste. While there may be some shadowing effect, I think it will be negligible compared to the savings in land costs.

As per the policy, most of the solar and wind sites are located near each other which will make it easy to install 10 GW of combined solar and wind farms across the country. States with high wind power potential such as Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu are also considered as extremely favorable from the point of view of solar generation due to good solar radiation in these states. The demand is also quite good for electricity, as they are more industrialized than the rest of the country and have high economic growth rates to boost.

The new policy does not specify any incentive that will be given to these hybrid farms. It talks of intervention, mainly in terms of connection to the transmission systems and that these farms will gets subsidized loans from IREDA. The mechanism of how these wind solar farms will be awarded is not specified in much detail.