Oil and natural gas PSUs to contribute to global solar fund
The five companies to contribute to the ISA corpus fund are ONGC, IOCL, BPCL, HPCL and GAIL (India) Ltd.
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.
The minister said that the state-run energy companies 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 organized by ISA.
The five companies to contribute to the ISA corpus fund are ONGC, IOCL, BPCL, HPCL and GAIL (India) Ltd.
In 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 per cent of this would be non-thermal energy based. —FE
