In line with the National initiative on Solar Mission, North Central Railway (NCR) has taken several innovative steps under Solar Mission-2021-22 claiming to have been the highest among all the Zonal Railways.

As per the press statement issued, while in 2020-21 NCR generated 106 lakhs unit of energy using solar power, in the financial year 2021-22, 124 lakhs units of energy were generated using solar power, an improvement of 17% over last year.

“Not only it’s a big leap towards a larger goal of environment protection as solar energy is a greener source of energy, it has led to substantial savings in revenue too,” stated the NCR.

It further stated, “NCR has achieved net revenue saving of Rs. 5.01 crores using solar power in the year 2021-22. While in financial year 2020-21, net revenue saving was Rs 3.97 crore, this year an improvement of 26% has been recorded in revenue saving by using solar energy.”

Importantly, this improvement has been done without incurring any extra expenditure.

NCR has a total installed capacity of 11.03 MWp. While 120 kWp has been installed by the Railway, remaining 10882.34 kWp capacities has been installed by two major Solar Power Developers (SPD) Azure and ReNew on a PPP basis.

Among the major places where roof top solar plants have been installed are station buildings, workshops, training schools, GM office and DRM office buildings.

About 10500 tones of reduction in carbon emissions have been achieved by NCR using solar power in the year.

Productivity of solar plants is measured in terms of Capacity utilization factor (CUF). NCR solar panels have recorded a CUF of 12.8 % during the year which is highest among all the seventeen zonal railways.

In order to promote solar energy, utmost importance is being given to maintenance of solar plants. Some of the steps includes monitoring of Solar Energy generation being done for each plant, inverter wise.

Daily monitoring, instead of monthly, of Energy CUF% of plants is being done. Defective/Decommissioned plants due to roof repairs, inverters, cables, etc have been put right besides others.

GM NCR Pramod Kumar has congratulated the team of officers and staff for this achievement and has called for adopting a focussed approach for augmenting the share of solar energy in its total non-traction electrical energy consumption.