India’s wind energy sector is led by indigenous wind power industry and has shown consistent progress. Wind power capacity is mainly spread across the Southern and Western regions. As of 30 September 2020, the total installed wind power capacity was 38.124 GW, the fourth largest installed wind power capacity in the world.
Apart from wind India has abundant solar potential resource. Solar sector has also been growing at rapid pace and the installed capacity of solar has reached 36.9 GW as on Nov 2020, establishing itself as the third-largest solar market in the world.
Though Wind and Solar Farms produce enough energy to fulfil the energy requirement, as they are intermittent sources, the energy generation varies temporally and seasonally i.e. wind farm operates effectively during windy months and similarly solar operates during sun shine hours. One of the fruitful alternative, to overcome this issue and to achieve a consistent energy generation, could be a wind – solar combined hybrid model. The Hybrid system is one of the most promising alternative method for conventional energy sources and has been increasingly used to generate electric power from renewable sources. Moreover, the hybrid system could be useful for supplying power at remote area locations due to its better generation consistency.
National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE), Chennai had already prepared wind and solar potential maps throughout country. Under this work, NIWE has prepared the Hybrid wind – solar map by combining both the wind and solar potential maps for the betterment of the public and stakeholders. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Govt. of India announced a new wind-solar hybrid policy on May 2018. The interactive portal displaying the hybrid map is expected to support the Government’s efforts and useful for prospecting new wind solar hybrid project areas in the country and also expected to be helpful for repowering / upgrading of existing Wind and Solar farms. This information is also expected to serve the needs of policy makers, investors, developers, manufacturers and other government agencies in their efforts to achieve the countries RE goals.