Aug 4 2010
Meenakshi College for women, located in the city of Chennai, India, has requested for a funding, to install a solar plant under the recently formulated Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM).
The Tamil Nadu Energy Development Agency (TEDA), entrusted with the job of selecting the applicants, has announced the shortlisting of the college last week. Incidentally it is the only educational institution that could make it to the list of 29 shortlisted institutions out of the total number of 70 applications. The college will become the primary and only JNNSM project in the city of Chennai, if the Center’s Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Limited (IREDA) extends its approval for the project.
The College is to install a 100 kW solar plant at a cost of about Rs 1 crore. According to Srikanth Narasimhan, Director, the college is planning to utilize the project for research, employing 10 various types of PV cells such as thin film and crystalline to analyze the power producing capabilities. He added that at present the college utilizes a 2 kW solar plant installed few months ago along with a solar tracker for researching the optimum tracking of solar power for generating additional electricity.
K S Lakshmi, Secretary of the college said, the college is planning to generate DC power and convert it to AC current for convenient feeding into the utility grid and the college has already received a clearance certificate from the Tamilnadu Electricity Board for the erection of a solar plant. She detailed the plans of the college to generate power from the solar light during the initial stages and latter switch over to producing energy from the heat of the sun.