Five PSUs to join ISA's Climate Action Coalition
The Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan announced five Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) under the Petroleum Ministry will be working with the International Solar Alliance Coalition for Sustainable Climate Action during the online World Solar Technology Summit held by ISA on September 8.
Indian Oil Corporation Limited, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and GAIL India Limited are the five PSUs that will be participating.
Pradhan described the purpose of this amalgamation, “Oil and gas companies in India will work closely with ISA to explore opportunities for implementation of solar based projects within India as well in other countries, particularly other developing countries where ISA is focusing for faster development of solar energy infrastructure.” He also mentioned that in order to reduce the carbon footprint, these companies will be focusing more on green energy investments such as biofuels and renewables.
“Our oil and gas companies are also making efforts to deploy solar panels across the value chain of their operations, and current installed solar power capacity is 270 MW," he said about the current solar capacity of India, further alluding that an additional 60 Mega Watt Solar Capacity will be added in the coming year. On a similar note, he said that Indian Oil’s 5,000 fuel stations were solarised last year.
ISA is an alliance of solar-resource-rich countries (which lie either completely or partly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn) set up by India and France at the Paris meeting on climate change in November 2015.