Oil PSUs to contribute to International Solar Alliance’s corpus fund

“We have taken up the mission of solarising about 50% of fuel stations owned by public sector oil companies in the next five years,” Pradhan said while speaking at the first World Solar Technology Summit organised by ISA.

Five 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, Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Tuesday. It is not immediately clear how much these oil companies would contribute to the ISA fund, but PSUs like NTPC, PGCIL, REC, PFC, CIL and PFC had earlier contributed $1 million each to this corpus.

Pradhan said the energy PSUs will be focusing more on green energy investments such as renewables, biofuels and hydrogen going forward.

“We have taken up the mission of solarising about 50% of fuel stations owned by public sector oil companies in the next five years,” Pradhan said while speaking at the first World Solar Technology Summit organised by ISA.

The five companies to contribute to the ISA corpus fund are ONGC, IOCL, BPCL, HPCL and GAIL (India).

At the same event, NTPC chairman Gurdeep Singh said that the company has inked a memorandum of understanding with ISA to implement 47 solar projects in lesser developed countries and small island states. NTPC aims to piggyback ISA to expand solar footprint as it increases the share of renewable energy in its generation portfolio. By 2032, it plans to have a total power production capacity of 1,30,000 MW and 30% of this would be non-thermal energy based.

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 implement the country’s ‘One Sun One World One Grid’ (OSOWOG) initiative, which plans to build a global ecosystem of interconnected renewable energy resources that can be seamlessly shared through a common transmission system. Through this initiative, the government aims to build global consensus about sharing solar resources among more than 140 countries of West Asia and Southeast Asia.

Apart from the PSU contributions, India has put in $26 million to the ISA for creating a corpus fund, building infrastructure and meeting day to day recurring expenditure of the organisation till FY22. In 2018, the government had also announced about $1.4 billion worth of lines of credit for covering 27 solar projects across 15 countries.

ISA is a treaty-based intergovernmental organisation headquartered in India, which plans to mobilise more than $1,000 billion of investments by 2030 to promote solar technology in countries lying between the tropics of cancer and capricorn. As on date, 68 countries have signed and ratified the ISA framework agreement.