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Cochin International Airport Ltd (CIAL) -- the airport operator which owns the world’s first airport fully powered by solar energy -- is all set to commission its new solar power plant at Payyanur.
With this, CIAL has emerged forward from its current status of being a power neutral airport to a power positive airport.
The 12 MWp Payyanur plant will be inaugurated by the Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on March 6.
With the commissioning of Payyanur plant, the cumulative installed capacity of solar plants of CIAL has been scaled up to 50 MWp. These include seven plants functioning at the premises of the airport, a solar carport and the one to be commissioned now at Payyanur.
CIAL’s solar power plants will together generate 2 hundred thousand (2 lakh of units) of power a day whereas the airport’s daily power consumption stands at 1.6 hundred thousands of units.
CIAL Managing Director S.Suhas said the airport attained the status of World’s first airport fully powered by solar energy way back in 2015. As the company has been embarked on a spree of infrastructures development activities, periodic enhancement of the installed capacity of energy projects was required. CIAL is known for its adherence to the idea of sustainable development and which prompted the effective utilization of green energy for all its power requirements. This vision of embracing energy efficiency instigated the construction of eight power plants and a small hydro-electrical project at Arippara, Kozhikode. The latest in the series is the new solar power plant at Ettukudukka near Payyannur, he said.
The power plant boasts of 12 megawatt capacity on a 35-acre land where CIAL introduced a concept of Terrain based Installation where the geographical characteristics of the area are retained, and no changes have been made in the gradient of the land. Terrain based installation increases the land utilisation compared to flat land by decreasing the space between the solar module arrays. The land area required for solar PV installation is reduced to approximately 2.75 acre /MW as compared to 3.75 acre / MW in flat land. The focus was on building the plant by retaining the gradient of the land. This could accommodate 35 per cent extra solar panels which will subsequently generate more energy.
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