Expert Speak – Interview with Agostinho Miguel Garcia, SunBD

By Bahwan CyberTek, January 5, 2018

SunBD – Sun Business Development is a Portugal based solar consultancy and engineering firm that began operations in 2009. They specialize in providing consulting and engineering services in solar, wind and energy efficiency to lenders, investors, EPCs, Renewable IPPs and OEMs.

One of the principal consultants of SunBD, Mr. Agostinho Miguel Garcia has done extensive work in India since 2011 on developing solar power projects including pioneering work on solar parks, one of which is, the Bhadla solar park in Rajasthan. Currently still involved deeply in solar power projects in India, he leads a team to support the balancing and integration of solar parks into the Indian grid at the state and the national level.

Solar parks are built at locations prepared to host solar projects where the facilities required are all available and ready as well as PPAs. This approach, pioneered by India in the world, has led to major records in terms of the cost of solar power, like the recent 2.44 INR/kWh in Bhadla.

Mr. Garcia was interviewed by BCT, to get insights into the Indian Solar Market from an expert’s point of view.

On SunBD & work in India:

“SunBD is a consultancy and engineering firm entirely dedicated to Renewable Energies, namely solar, wind and energy efficiency. We are a team of very experienced professionals involved in Renewables for a long time, starting in the early 1990s. Our careers have evolved in different areas, which have given us the capacity to look at projects from several perspectives and provide value-add to our customers. Our work in India has been based on working with the Ministry of New and Renewable energy (MNRE), the nodal agencies in the states like the Rajasthan Renewable Energy Corporation (RREC) and also local leading public companies like NTPC and Mahagenco. We have also witnessed the creation of the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) and may be still one of the few who are still working for so many years with these institutions.”

 On the Indian government’s ambitious targets for renewable energy, especially solar energy:

“The Indian government has set targets of generating 175GW of renewable energy by 2022 at the Paris summit in 2015. Of these, solar energy was to contribute 100GW. Currently the view is to have 60GW from utility scale solar plants, including 40 GW from solar parks and 40 GW from rooftop solar. Two years after this target was set, we can see that rooftop solar has grown slower than expected. At this rate, it will be difficult to meet targets and the government should look at some of the factors that could help accelerate growth of rooftop solar if it is to realistically expect so much of a sector that suffers from many structural issues. On the utility scale solar plants, solar parks have provided the conditions for very aggressive tariff bidding. However, I see that transmission & distribution is something that needs to be sorted out urgently as generation alone is never the solution. Nonetheless, the progress has been very interesting to watch, and India currently is in the top 3 hottest solar markets worldwide.”

On the key challenges for renewable energy in this market:

“Transmission & Distribution is the backbone to evacuate power. This needs to be planned urgently to ensure that there is sufficient evacuation and also dispatch capacity provided to solar and wind projects.

On the commercial side, rooftop solar is something the state electricity regulation commissions (SERCs) are going to have to look at very closely – they can generate significant power if the policies are right, but discoms may be unhappy to see reduced cash flows if their paying commercial customers opt for rooftop solar. In the interest of the environment and of the availability of roofspace, this should definitely be encouraged, but discoms may need to undergo substantial changes from their current business models and mindset.

As utility scale variable renewable power grows, dispatch and demand both have to keep pace, else there will be either unnecessary curtailments, which economically are not justified or because the demand is offset by the generation. Time-of-use (ToU) tariffs must be adopted to help people and companies shift their habits and benefit from the available renewable resources, namely wind and solar.

Now, let’s move to operations of solar plants. Some of the utility scale solar plants in India opted to keeping initial capex costs low, and may have ended up buying cheap quality PV modules and inverters as well as other components. In the medium term, they may face stress on the performance of their plants.”

On the markets that India can still learn from:

“India entered the solar energy space relatively later, and it’s turned out to be a blessing in many ways. All countries in Europe had feed-in tariffs (FiT) for renewable energy that allowed for solar power to decrease in costs due to the created demand. This reduction of cost was only actually considered in some markets and the mentality of having tariffs proportional to a certain installed capacity in the country proved to be a gold rush. Markets cool down in 2008 and Fit were stopped and auctions started to appear, initially for licenses, which until then was a thriving business in Europe. India though under pressure from many parties eventually decided to opt for competitive bidding, setting caps for tariffs. The results have been astounding and not limited to India. I’m sure the discoms and SERCs are very pleased with the tariffs, but currently have found themselves with completely different problems – No longer the quest for grid parity, but actually the aftermath of going below grid parity.

Many firms in India also invested in building technical knowhow about solar projects and associated skills. Hence you have many skilled EPC contractors & O&M players in India, which has also helped keep costs low.

India can still learn from what South America is doing in terms of power auctions, but initiatives as solar parks being followed in few other countries may need to be actually followed by other countries also. For instance, solar panel prices, while being on a downward trend, may be affected by various factors and may rise slightly. These trends need to be considered during the price discovery process.”

On technology trends that could affect the solar energy market in India:

I see a few factors that will play a big role in future projects:

Storage: We often mistake storage to only electrical batteries, which is not. Storage actually means many possibilities and in India the lowest cost in storage comes from hydro power plants. They are the first level of storage in the country and northern water rich states should be in the first line to develop hydro plants with reservoirs and capacity to reverse pumping and store energy. Second issue on storage is that also erroneously most think storage means a battery in a solar power plant. There is a much broader scope for grid storage than plant storage, as the battery would be much more used under such scenario than within a tight PPA, even with some flexibility or incentives for peak shifting or even ramping. And let us not forget thermal storage, which under the right policy framework may still play a role in India.

Better cleaning technologies: We often underestimate a critical resource in the operation of solar plants: water. Today, most plants use a lot of water to keep solar panels clean. But think of it for a moment. Once you hit 100GW of solar, you’re talking of a lot of water for cleaning that will be a huge overhead in water-scarce areas where solar plants are usually setup. Many firms in Europe time their cleaning based on thresholds of performance degradation and also recycle the water used for cleaning. Furthermore dry and hybrid cleaning technologies (dry and wet) must really be taken into consideration as more solar plants are setup. Water cannot be seen as free and endless.

Drones and imaging: A lot of O&M inspection happens in a low-tech manner by having ground personnel visually inspect panels, perform thermography or take photographs for analysis. We will see drones emerging as a key technology in this space as they offer so many advantages over the manual approach: they can cover large areas efficiently, they can help given aerial view of the plant, use thermography or IR photography to indicate hot spots on panels and other equipment and also take photos that can be analyzed by software to identify current & potential future issues.

Data analytics: Analytics are going to be the driver for a whole set of improvements in solar plants. By ingesting data from a variety of sources, we will see software help with elements like performance monitoring, problem discovery, energy prediction, breakdown prediction and inventory optimization, planning budgets and more. On the grid side, analytics can help better load planning and dispatch of electricity, as well as managing storage charge/recharge across the grid based on current and expected demand. The grid & plants of the future will be a lot more software-driven, and this will help drive economies of projects down.”

Author Profile
Bahwan CyberTek

Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) is an innovative solutions partner for global Fortune 500 organizations and has delivered transformational solutions across Logistics, Predictive Analytics, Payments & Citizen services & Education through IP-led products and cognitive solutions, growth accelerators and innovative outcome-based business models.

BCT has over 1000+ Enterprise Customers, 3500+ SME Customers and 475+ Universities across the world.

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Bahwan CyberTek

Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) is an innovative solutions partner for global Fortune 500 organizations and has delivered transformational solutions across Logistics, Predictive Analytics, Payments & Citizen services & Education through IP-led products and cognitive solutions, growth accelerators and innovative outcome-based business models. BCT has over 1000+ Enterprise Customers, 3500+ SME Customers and 475+ Universities across the world.

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