Fortum Finnsurya Energy has completed its 10 MW solar power project in Madhya Pradesh, making it the last solar power plant to be connected to the national electricity grid in the year 2014 and the first plant to be commissioned among the projects awarded under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission’s Phase II Batch I round of bidding.

Fortum, a Finnish company, had asked for (and got) a viability gap funding of Rs 8.199 crore for the 10 MW plant, so that it could sell electricity to the public sector Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), at the pre-fixed tariff of Rs 5.45 a kWhr. The plant has come up on a 70 acre piece of land at Kapeli, in the Ujjain district. Formal inauguration of the plant will take place in early 2015, a press release from Fortum said.

For this project, Fortum used 125,000 thin-film modules based on cadmium-telluride technology.

This is Fortum’s second investment in the Indian solar sector. Last year, the company took over a 5 MW solar project in Rajasthan from a Kolkata-based company, Amrit Energy, which was also Fortum’s first entry into solar power globally. Amrit Energy had won the project under the National Solar Mission’s first round of bidding, and the electricity generated by the plant would fetch a tariff of Rs 12.75 a kWhr.

When Fortum tookover the Rajasthan plant, the company’s Managing Director, Maati Kaarnakari, had said that Fortum was open to investing “200 to 250 million Euros” in the Indian solar sector and wanted “a few tens of megawatts of solar capacity in India”.

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