Regen Powertech to launch wind-solar hybrid systems

Chennai: Regen Powertech Ltd, one of India’s leading wind turbine manufacturing companies, is ready to launch wind-solar hybrid systems, the company’s Managing Director, Madhusudan Khemka, said.
While the idea of putting a solar power plant under a windmill is not altogether new, Regen has perfected the system, marrying photo-voltaic plants of either 500 kV or 750 kV with Regen’s 1.5 MW wind turbines. The tweaking has been done in terms of optimising power electronics. The cost of the solar plant would be 20 per cent lower than a standalone solar plant of the same capacity, Khemka told journalists on the sidelines of Renergy 2014 , a renewable energy conference-and-expo, organised here by the Tamil Nadu Energy Development Agency. There are always sufficient chunks of land which won’t fall in the shadow of the wind tower, he said. This is important because if a shadow falls on any part of a solar plant, the generation of electricity of the entire plant will suffer. Though Khemka did not disclose costs, he said the economics worked out favourably.
Regen, which produces gearless turbines with permanent magnet-based generators using technology licensed from Vensys of Germany, sold 300-MW capacity of machines in the twelve months ended March 2014. The company has extended its financial year till September.
Khemka said that the company has orders worth 550 MW to be executed this year. “We are extremely busy this year,” he said. He said the company had enough land banks under its control to support 1,000 MW of wind turbine installations.