Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) plans to invest Rs25,000 crore in alternative energy and sustainable development projects and scale up its renewable energy generation capacity from 212 MW to 260 MW by next year.
The plan includes expanding the company’s PV portfolio from 28.1 MW of off-grid and 20.5 MW of grid-connected solar generation capacity.
“IOCL has an installed capacity of 216 MW of renewable energy, including 167.6 MW of wind and 48.6 MW of solar,” IndianOil chairman Sanjiv Singh wrote in the company’s annual report for last year. “During FY2018-19, 14.2 MW of solar PV capacity was added and installation of another 13 MW is in progress.”
The ‘solarization’ of fuel stations is one of IndianOil’s breakthrough initiatives and a record number of 5,033 facilities switched to solar power in the last fiscal year. To date, more than half the network of fuel stations – 14,173 sites with a 77 MW generation capacity – have made the switch.
IndianOil has 12.68 MW of solar generation capacity at its refineries and offices. The company recently commissioned a 500 kW rooftop and ‘solar tree’ installation at its Barauni refinery.
EV plans
Taking its cue from the government’s electric vehicle (EV) push, IndianOil wants its refuelling stations to become ‘fuel solution centers’, featuring EV chargers alongside petrol and diesel facilities, and has already installed chargers at some outlets. The company has also installed solar lights and pumps under its Jal Jeevan scheme.
In the last fiscal year IndianOil generated 388 GWh of energy from renewables, according to the annual report, and claims to have diversified into 2G and 3G ethanol, waste-to-energy and compressed biogas as alternative fuel types.
IndianOil is the nation’s largest oil refiner and provides almost half of India’s petrol demand. With a group refining capacity of 80.7 million metric tonnes per annum, the fossil fuel giant was ranked 137th in the Fortune Global 500 listing of the world’s largest firms last year.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
2 comments
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.