Hartek Solar, part of the Chandigarh-based Hartek group, has bagged a Rs 80-crore contract to build a 22 MW floating solar plant on the reservoir of the Bhakra Nangal dam.
“When commissioned in March 2024, this would be North India’s largest floating solar plant,” Hartek Solar’s Founder and CEO, Simarpreet Singh, told businessline recently.
A unique feature of the project, which also presents a challenge, is that the solar plant is built on flowing water, he said. The plant will be owned by SJVN Ltd, a utility, which will sell the power to the Bhakra Beas Management Board.
Hartek Solar is one of the leading solar EPC companies, having built about 5 GW of solar plants till date, many of them rooftop plants. It has also built a 2 MW floating solar plant on a water tank in Chandigarh. “We could complete the project in 51 days,” Singh said.
A floating solar project would cost between Rs 5.5 crore and Rs 6 crore per MW — between 20 and 30 per cent higher than ground-mounted, utility-scale solar projects.
The 33-year-old Hartek group is also into building power transmission and selling power distribution products and has a play in smart cities, Singh said.
Floating solar
‘Floating solar’ is slowly catching on in India. The country’s biggest operational floating solar plant is NTPC’s 100 MW plant at Ramagundam, Telangana, while the biggest proposed project is the 600 MW Omkareshwar project in Madhya Pradesh, which, when commissioned, could be the world’s biggest.
Because the water underneath keeps them cool, the panels generate more electricity and also reduce evaporation. A government press release in July 2022 said the Ramagundam project would help avoid evaporation of 3.25 million cubic meters of water annually.
