The Andhra Pradesh cabinet has approved a proposal to set up a 10,000 megawatt (MW) mega solar power project to ensure farmers get access to nine-hours of uninterrupted power in the daytime.
The cabinet also established an Integrated Renewable Energy Project (IREP), the IREP is expected to generate 550 MW of wind power, 1200 MW of hydropower and 1000MW of solar power in the state.
“Under the Green Energy Development Charge, the state government will be earning a revenue of Rs 32 crores,” said Perni Venkataramaiah, Minister for Information and Public Relations.
In February, the AP government had announced plans for setting up of 10 GW of solar power projects to ensure free supply of power to the farmers in the state.
The AP government had been incurring an expenditure of more than Rs 10,000 crore on agriculture and aquaculture subsidies and Lift Irrigation (LI) power charges every year and the subsidies had been increasing over the years due to the rising cost of power supply as well as an increase in the number of pump sets. It was felt that there is a need to ensure subsidies are provided to farmers on a sustainable basis, by evolving an alternative mechanism to provide quality power and nine-hour free supply of power to farmers during the daytime.
As per reports, Andhra Pradesh accounts for 3.4 GW of large-scale solar projects in operations, and approximately 1.6 GW of projects are under the development pipeline as of December 2019.
