The engineering consultancy RITES Limited, plans to tender 400 MW of solar projects which are to be set up on vacant land owned by the Indian Railways. The project will be developed under the capital expenditure model and should be completed by the developer in a period of 420 days. Bidders will be required to submit an earnest money deposit of Rs 400,000 per MW of bid capacity. The tender document will be made available on June 20, 2020 and the last date for submission of bids is September 16, 2020.
Recently, the Railway Energy Management Company Limited (REMCL), a subsidiary of RITES Limited, announced plans to tender, supervise and manage 3GW of solar projects which are to be set up on vacant railway land. The project will be divided into three phases each having an installed capacity of 1 GW. The first and third phase will be developed on a public-private partnership basis under a design-build-finance-operate-transfer model, while the second phase will be based on an ownership model with REMCL as the owner and will be eligible for capital subsidy.The 3 GW projects are slated to be completed by 2022-23.
Indian Railways (IR), the country’s largest electricity consumer, accounting for 2.4 per cent of the total consumption, and the third largest user of high speed diesel (2.6 billion litres annually), now plans to become the world’s first 100 per cent green railway network by 2030. The ambitious plan is an extension of its bid to develop 1 GW of solar generation capacity in 2020 and meet 10 per cent of its energy demand from renewables as well as to hit the 5 GW capacity mark by 2025.