CB BureauIf it meets all ecological mandates, the World’s
biggest solar-power generating facility will be built on a salt-producing plain
in Rajasthan.
To be built at the cost $1.2 billion in the first phase, the
project will sit on 20,000 acres (30 square miles) of dried-up land that is no
longer required for salt production and generates about 4.000 megawatts of
power. This will be a green power boost to India’s energy need. The country
consumes an average of 772,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of power annually.
‘…the project should have a lifespan of 25
years, and reduce the country’s carbon footprint by over four million tons of
carbon dioxide each year. Currently, 67 per cent of India’s energy requirements
are met by rapidly depleting coal deposits. To offset this dependency, India needs
a clean energy revolution,’ AN Srivastava, director at the Ministry of New and
Renewable Energy has recently said in an interview.
‘There is almost 30 square miles of barren
land surrounding the (Sambhar Lake) site which could be well-utilised for green
energy production. The project fits under India’s National Action Plan on
Climate Change, which calls for greater use of renewable energy, and would be
environmentally friendly,’ said RK Tandon, chairman and managing director of
Hindustan Salts Limited, one of the partners in the solar plant, in an
interview with Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The project is expected to bring down the prices
for solar energy and close a huge gap between power production and power demand
in rural areas.
On the other hand, the government has not
yet announced the project’s boundaries, and environment experts fear that it
may touch Sambhar Lake wetlands protected under the international Ramsar
Convention, and that it could also affect nearby villages and illegal
settlements and encroachments might happen on the wetlands.
Sambhar Lake is one of the largest
salt-producing areas in India, and has been used for salt production since the
1870s. The lake basin is spread at the confluence of three districts of
Rajasthan – Jaipur, Nagaur and Ajmer – and is close to the fringes of the
desert. The lake depends on rainwater supplies, which have been declining in
the area as a result of changing weather patterns and greater use of water by
the growing town of Sambhar, with 24,000 people, and by close to 100 small
illegal settlements in the catchment area.
Over the past several decades, large
areas of land surrounding the lake have dried out and no longer flood
regularly. This is the land the government now hopes to use to build the solar
farm.
Sambhar Lake, an important habitat for
birds, particularly flamingos, is among 25 wetlands of international importance
in India.
India’s Wetlands Conservation and Management Rules 2010 prohibit the
setting up of industries in flood areas or industrial activity likely to have
an adverse impact on wetland ecosystems, according to a Ministry of Environment
and Forests official. Such rules may drive the final footprint of the solar
project.
Such a project has to be approved by 12
members of the Central Wetlands Regulatory Authority including seven officials
from key ministries such as Environment and Forests, Water, and Agriculture, as
well as five environmentalists or other leading experts.