Indian Railways plans to set up 30 GW of solar power plants on vacant land

Indian Railways (IR) is planning to set up solar power plants of capacity 30 GW on its vacant land, including the land available along the tracks. Currently, IR has 51,000 hectares of vacant land and will soon identify suitable patches to set up solar power plants. Under the first phase, IR plans to install 10 GW of solar plants and formalities for the same are being finalised. Of the total capacity of 10 GW, 3 GW will be utilised by IR and the remaining 7 GW will be used by the distribution companies. The current plan is a significant increase over the previous target of generating 1,000 MW of solar energy and 200 MW of wind energy by 2020. The earlier plan also involved setting up 500 MW of rooftop solar projects across all 8,000 railway stations in the country.