HARNESSING NON-CONVENTIONAL ENERGY POTENTIAL USING SPACE BORNE SENSORS

摘要

India has the fifth largest power generation capacity in the world and its current renewable energy-contribution stands at 57.2 GW, contributing 17.3 % of the total installed capacity, which includes 32.3 GW of wind power and 12.3 GW of solar power installed capacity in the country as on 2017. It has fourth largest installed capacity of wind power, third largest installed capacity of concentrated solar power (CSP). The Government of India has revised its target of renewable energy capacity to 175 GW by end of 2022, committed to Clean and Green Energy and is driving efforts to achieve 40% power installed capacity from non-conventional energy resources and reducing emissions by 33- 35% of its GDP by 2030. This ambitious target includes 100 GW of Solar power. 60 GW from wind power, 10 GW from biomass power and 5 GW from small hydro power. In order to evaluate the potential energy resource, accurate long-term measurements are utmost important, which is not presently possible with the limited measurements available across India. Satellite remote sensing could provide synoptic data, covering larger areas continuously for longer periods. At Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad one of the major centres of ISRO, valuable databases of winds, solar energy and wave energy resources have been utilised from several Indian and foreign satellite datasets synergistically. Solar Insolation has been generated at monthly interval using Kalpana satellite (2009-2016) and INSAT-3D from 2016 onwards. The end products include Global Horizontal irradiance, direct and diffuse normal irradiance, capacity utilization factor and Annual energy production available for the entire country and also at selected 'Smart cities". Monthly wind climatology over the Indian seas has been derived from QuikSCAT (1999-2009). OSCAT (2010-2014), ASCAT Metop-A (2010-2016) and Metop-B (2012-2016) scatterometers. Monthly and Annual wind energy potential has been estimated by considering the bathymetric variations within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Indian coast. Relatively less exploited wave energy potential was also estimated along the Indian waters using merged altimetry products (2009-2017) and state-of-art numerical models. These datasets are very essential to assess the potential renewable energy resources within India and its neighbouring coasts. All these datasets are available for the scientific community and other users through the Visualisation of Earth Observation Data and Archival System (VEDAS — www.vedas.sac.gov.in) web portal and android based applications.