Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal & New and Renewable Energy said that the Union Government has equal focus on various forms of renewable power and does not discriminate between solar, wind or biogas power in terms of providing support to these renewable sources. Shri Goyal said that the Government reinstated accelerated depreciation to boost wind power sector in the first budget of the new government so that people can expand and take benefits of the same. He was speaking after launching Indian Wind Resource Atlas at 100 metre level here today.Piyush Goyal stated that the Atlas will help policy makers at Centre and State Governments to deal with issues related to tariff fixation, transmission, grade frequency etc and providing better infrastructure for the investors. He said that he is personally very delighted that the ministry has provided such crucial information in public domain at free of cost. He assured that the Ministries of Coal, Power and New & Renewable Energy will keep on providing more and more data in public domain and thus work on bringing transparency in the system. Shri Saurabh Patel, Gujarat Energy Minister, Shri Rajendra Shukla, Madhya Pradesh Energy Minister, Shri Pushpendra Singh, Rajasthan Energy Minister, Shri D.K. Shivkumar, Karnataka Energy Minister, senior officials from central agencies, state government and high level representatives of the wind industry were also present at the occasion.
The new Indian Wind Atlas is an important online GIS (Geographic Information System) tool for identification of the regional and local wind energy potential in India. It contains average annual values of Wind Speed (m/s), Wind Power Density and Capacity Utilization Factor (CUF) calculated for an average 2 MW turbine at 100 m. In the atlas the resultant layers are at very high resolution and joint frequency tables have been derived for the entire country at 500 m resolution. Also, high resolution Re-analysis data set has been used for the study- NCEP/CFSR which enhanced the accuracy of the mapping. The Atlas uses dynamic meso-micro coupled WRF modelling technique.
Brief on Wind Energy Sector & Resource Atlas
Grid connected renewable power has been a major focus area in the Ministry. So far, the installed capacity of renewable power is about 36,500 MW. Wind Power has made significant contribution to this achievement by way of 24,000 MW installed capacity, mainly in the states of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Wind Electric Generators of unit sizes between 225 KW to 2.50 MW have been deployed across the country. India ranks 5th in the world after China, USA, Germany and Spain. Necessity for energy security and caution on environmental degradation made wind as one of the non-ignorable source in Indian energy mix. The government’s target of 60,000 MW of wind power by 2022 is highlighting the needed focus on the green power’s contribution in India’s sustainable development. In order to meet the ambitious goals, India is not only committed to refine and strengthen the regulatory framework governing wind power in India, but also to provide the necessary reliable background information on the geographical variation and magnitude of the Indian wind resource and an estimated gross technical potential spread across entire country at today’s wind turbine hub heights . This information is essential for the policy makers, private players, Government agencies and other stakeholders of the industry to move towards achieving the ambitious goal as envisaged by the Government. With the above facts into consideration, 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. NIWE (formerly C-WET) had already performed the potential estimation study corroborating meso-scale derived wind maps and micro-scale measurements and released Indian Wind Atlas at 50m and indicative values at 80m hub heights with 5km resolution in April 2010 in collaboration with RISO-DTU, Denmark. The potential assessment presently has been carried out at a very high (10times finer than 5km) resolution of 500m, using the advanced meso-micro coupled numerical wind flow model and with the corroboration of almost 1300 actual measurements spread all over India. The land information has been taken through land availability estimation using authentic data sources of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) in GIS format with detailed information available from Bhuvan Atlas maintained by the Department of land Resources in collaboration with the National remote Sensing Agency.