India launches Wind Resource Atlas; Estimates nation’s wind power potential at 302 GW
India’s renewable energy market is increasingly attracting worldwide investments one after one. All eyes would be on India in UN Climate Change Meeting in Paris this December.
India has made a commitment to cut its emission by 25% by 2010 and upgrade renewable energy generation capacity to massive 175 GW. This target will derive 100 GW from solar energy and rest 75 from wind energy.
The National Institute of Wind Energy has estimated India’s installed wind energy potential at 302 GW with 100 meter high towers. India’s Minister of State Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal, on Wednesday released the information with the launch of a wind resource atlas.
According to the press release from Ministry,
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India, through National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE), an autonomous institute of MNRE, announced the “Indian Wind Resource Atlas : Online GIS”, using scientific combination of satellite and one of the world’s largest number of measured (1300 locations ) ground data. Under the direction of MNRE, the National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE), has created an online GIS based wind resource atlas at 100m hub height with scientific rigor and based on authentic latest available data-sets of wind as well as land geographically spread across India.
The Atlas is aimed to assist policy makers at Centre and State Governments in matters of tariff fixation, transmission grade frequency etc, along with facilitating investors with better infrastructure.
Basically, the Atlas is an online GIS (Geographic Information System) tool that will help in identifying the regional and local wind energy potentials. It will provide crucial data such as average annual values of Wind Speed, Wind Power Density and Capacity Utilization Factor (CUF). The calculations are made at an average 2 MW turbine installed at 100 meter. Joint frequency tables are derived for the entire nation at 500 m resolution resultant layers.
Further, revealed data showed that in India’s present renewable power capacity of 36,500 MW, wind energy contributes 24,000 MW. Most of the wind energy is harnessed in states of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. India aims to achieve 60, 000 MW of wind power by 2022, which is an ambitious goal and fortune for foreign investors especially US, China, Germany etc.
The information provided through Atlas is essential not only for policy makers, but also for private players, Government agencies and other stakeholders in the industry.
