Thrust 3: Solar Energy Integration

SERIIUS' Solar Energy Integration research thrust focuses on identifying, analyzing, and assessing technical, economic, environmental, and policy aspects that will help to develop and execute solar technologies in India. This focus includes understanding resources, infrastructure, constraints, scale, deployment scenarios, and policy needs. The two key activities in this thrust are:

• Roadmapping and Assessment: Analyze the necessary market, policy, and technology data to develop roadmaps for the bankable deployment options for solar electric conversion.
• Solar Energy Integration and Storage Analysis: Quantify the interactions of a diverse set of solar electric generators on the grid in India, predict optimum deployment and interconnection, and validate the modeling. Look at the impact of localized storage and validate with test systems.

We aim to accelerate the development of new technologies for concentrating solar power (CSP) and photovoltaics (PV) tailored for the production and deployment landscape in India. Currently, no roadmap exists for technologies and manufacturing processes for India. Our challenge is to produce useful templates to develop technologies by assessing the current state of the technology, existing policy and regulatory framework, and technical and market factors. We will provide the needed guidance on research priorities and potential impact to maintain SERIIUS' focus on R&D for new materials, concepts, and systems in the other two thrusts.

The table summarizes the research projects and their tasks in the two consortium projects (SEI-1, SEI-2) in this activity.

Our key challenge is to define the potential deployment options for solar energy systems in India considering the complexity of the current Indian electric grid. We will use multiscale modeling of various scenarios in India, including grid analysis and the potential benefits of storage.

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Nehru Mission has a target of 2 GW of off-grid solar power; however, because solar is an intermittent source, cost-effective energy storage is very important to ensure energy supply when required. Similarly, the Nehru Mission has a target of 20 GW of grid-connected solar power—and at that scale, managing intermittency and load balancing will be serious issues.

The table summarizes the research projects and their tasks in the consortium project (SEI-3) and two core projects (SEICore-1, SEICore-2) in this activity.