RIL Solar Group, part of Reliance Industries, has commissioned a 1 MW solar plant on the roof of the Thyagaraj Stadium in New Delhi. The facility was developed by the Government of Delhi to be a model green stadium and to host netball in the Commonwealth Games this October.
RIL has also implemented solar plants in the Khanna tennis complex and solar LED street lights and garden lights in the Commonwealth Games Village. The solar initiative is one of the initiatives to offset the carbon emissions to be released through the Games.
India’s first 1 MW solar facility was constructed and commission in less than three months. It will generate 1.4 GWh of electricity per year, and any power not used in the stadium will be fed into the local grid, and will reduce CO2 emissions by 1200 tonnes per year.
Additional solar systems installed for Games
The tennis courts have three 2.6 kW solar plants on the roof and there are 34 back-up solar PV systems of 3 kW each, with 180 solar LED street lights and 500 garden lights in the Village which will house athletes, coaching and support staff.
“We have always believed that the renewable energy space is a natural extension of our strengths in the conventional energy platform,” says Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries.
“The nature of technical expertise and project execution demonstrated in developing the solar power infrastructure is a defining achievement for our Solar Group. We will continue our efforts in research, understanding and scaling up the deployment of these environment friendly sources of energy.”
The 1 MW solar plant in Thyagaraj Stadium includes a kalzip roof that minimises the use of mounting structures and a total of 3640 solar PV modules with an efficiency rating of 14.1%. The entire system has been installed within a roofspace of 10,000 m2.
Other initiatives of RIL Solar include 5 MW of solar panels in Khimsar, Rajasthan; a 50 kW roof-top solar PV plant at Judicial academy, Chandigarh; electrified villages in various states; a 42.5 kW roof-top project in HAREDA, Haryana; solar-powered ATM machines in rural areas of India; and solar-powered telecom towers.
Reliance Industries is India’s largest private company with annual revenue of US$29 billion and profit of US$4.41bn. It ranks 117th among the world's top 200 companies in terms of profits.
