Alternative power

Silchar, Sept. 18: Power-starved Mizoram is looking to the sun for help, officially.

All government buildings in Mizoram will be equipped with solar panels to generate electricity capable of powering up the particular building.

The government of Mizoram will also enact a legislation in the autumn session of the Assembly, making it mandatory for all the state government buildings to use solar power.

Under the move, the state government will also set up energy parks in various colleges and universities to light their buildings with non-conventional energy. Each park will be set up at a cost of Rs 12 lakh. Besides, Aizawl will have a Rs 1-crore state-level educational energy park.

A government official said Mizoram is an ideal place for exploiting solar power as this natural resource in available in abundance on its high hills and both its installation as well as recurring costs also come cheaper.

Mizoram generates nearly 60MW of power at present, against the demand for 80MW.

The move is part of the steps that the government of Mizoram has envisaged to tackle the state’s deteriorating power crisis and provide power to the villages scattered on the hilltops in the remote areas of the land-locked state.

The electricity department said there are still 36 villages — at an average of 65 households per village — in the state, which are still without power.

The government-sponsored solar power project, which will be executed in phases after the legislation on the solar energy is passed in the Assembly, also aims at using the degraded wastelands in the state to cultivate slender but sturdy bamboo, from whose chips and dusts non-conventional energy could be produced.

The government-run Zoram Electronic Development Agency has been selected as the nodal agency to implement the various schemes in the state relating to the non-conventional power such as solar and wind energy.

The director of the agency, Benjamin Tlumtea, said the advisory committee in each of the eight districts in Mizoram would be constituted to suggest the various possibilities to tap the non-conventional power in the state and help chart out programmes.

Under this scheme of harnessing the non-conventional source of power, the state government has also decided to provide solar lanterns, each costing about Rs 50,000, to 500 families living below poverty line in the remote locations.

Prodded by the Centre, Mizoram has been making steady progress during the past few years in utilising the non-conventional source of power such as the solar energy. So far, the state government had invested Rs 3.7 crore to provide standalone solar photo-voltaic power plant of each having 25kW capacity at the district civil hospital in Aizawl and some health centres