Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Tuesday said that 5 state-run oil and natural gas PSUs will become corporate partners of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) and will contribute to ISA’s corpus fund, It is not at once clear how much those oil companies could contribute to the ISA fund, but PSUs like NTPC, PGCIL, REC, PFC, CIL, and PFC had in advance contributed $1 million each to this corpus.
While speaking at the first World Solar Technology Summit organized by ISA, Pradhan stated that the energy PSUs can be focusing more on green power investments along with renewables, biofuels, and hydrogen going ahead. They have taken up the venture of solarising about 50% of fuel stations owned by public sector oil companies in the next 5 years. The 5 companies to contribute to the ISA corpus fund are ONGC, IOCL, BPCL, HPCL, and GAIL (India).
At the same event, NTPC chairman Gurdeep Singh stated that the company has inked a memorandum of understanding with ISA to put into effect forty-seven solar initiatives in lesser developed countries and small island states. NTPC targets to piggyback ISA to make a bigger solar footprint because it will increase the share of renewable energy in its generation portfolio.
ISA also signed a tripartite agreement with the ministry of new and renewable energy and the world bank which made it the nodal agency to put into effect the country’s ‘One Sun One World One Grid’ (OSOWOG) initiative, which plans to construct a global ecosystem of interconnected renewable energy sources that may be seamlessly shared through a common transmission system. Through this initiative, the government pursuits to build a global consensus about sharing solar resources among more than 140 countries of West Asia and Southeast Asia.
In 2018, the government had also announced about $1.4 billion worth of lines of credit for covering 27 solar projects across 15 international locations.
ISA is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization based in India, which plans to mobilize greater than $1,000 billion of investments by using 2030 to sell solar era in nations mendacity among the tropics of cancer and capricorn. As on date, 68 countries have signed and ratified the ISA framework settlement.
