Use of solar power will accelerate the Railway’s mission to achieve the goal of becoming ‘Net Zero Carbon Emission Railway’
- In order to achieve its objective of becoming 100% self-sustainable for all it’s power needs and also to contribute to national solar power goals, Indian Railways has solarised more than 960 stations till date .
- It may be noted that Indian Railways had recently organised a meet of leading solar power developers who had shared their expectations of being partners in the journey of Indian Railways to become “net zero carbon emitter” before 2030.
- Indian Railways is set to produce solar energy for meeting all it’s energy consumption needs of more than 33 billion units by 2030.
- Current annual requirement is about 20 billion units.
- Indian Railways has a mega plan for installing solar plants of 20 GW capacity by utilising its vacant land by 2030.
- Some of the Stations solarised are Varanasi, New Delhi,Old Delhi , Jaipur ,Secunderabad , Kolkata , Guwahati , Hyderabad , Howrah etc.
- About 51,000 hectare vacant land available with Indian Railways and is now ready to extend all support to the developers for installing solar power plants on Railway’s vacant un-encroached land.
- It may be noted that Railways is also set to achieve 100% electrification by the year 2023.
- It may be noted that Indian Railways is committed to utilize solar energy for meeting its traction power requirement and become a complete ‘Green mode of transportation’.
- This is in line with the recent directive of Hon’ble Prime Minister to solarise railway stations and utilize vacant railway land for Renewable Energy (RE) projects.
- The use of solar power will accelerate the Railways mission to achieve the goal of becoming ‘Net Zero Carbon Emission Railway’.
- In order to achieve this, Indian Railways has developed a mega plan for installing solar plants of 20 GW capacity by utilizing its vacant land by 2030.
