Goemkarponn desk
PORVORIM: Power Minister Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavalikar informed the Goa legislative assembly that the state will meet its solar energy targets if ‘floating solar plants’ with a combined capacity of 197 megawatts are installed soon in the reservoirs of four dams: Amthane, Anjunem, Chapoli, and Selaulim.
In response to a question regarding the requests for funding from the departments of electricity and new and renewable energy, Dhavalikar stated that a central government agency’s report had confirmed that these four dams have the capacity to generate 197 megawatts of solar power through floating solar plants.
He stated that in order to implement this idea, the State government will get to work on it shortly.
Earlier in the discussion, legislators from the opposition had criticized the power ministry for not achieving any real progress toward Goa’s goals of producing solar energy. MLAs in the Opposition had also seriously questioned the State’s efforts to meet its own targets for encouraging rooftop solar plants among individual houses.
Dhavalikar addressed the accusations by stating that the department had received 3,727 applications from private houses, of which about 3,400 had been examined and found to be technically feasible.
Additionally, he stated that 875 homes have benefited from the rooftop solar installation subsidy program to date and that approximately Rs 13 crores had been distributed in total subsidies. He also mentioned that the total capacity of all these rooftop solar arrays was 46.2 megawatts.
Dhavalikar said the Department of New and Renewable Energy had been established in 2016 but to date did not have a proper staffing structure allocated to it and was being run parallel with personnel drawn from the Electricity Department.
He also said that the State’s solar power policy was made in 2018 and amended in 2022. Now, GEDA is in the process of formulating a new solar energy policy for the State, a draft of which will be put out in the public domain very soon.
