Indian Railways sets up solar plant to feed power to railways overhead traction system

In a first of its kind use of technology globally, the Indian Railways has set up a solar plant at Bina, in Madya Pradesh, to directly power railways' overhead line.

"This project is first of its kind as the power generated by the solar power plant will be directly fed to the overhead electricity lines of the railways to power the traction system of the electric locomotives to run trains," Railway Board chairman V K Yadav said.

The Indian Railways in collaboration with Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) has set up a 1.7-megawatt solar power plant at Bina Traction Sub Station. The plant can generate around 25 lakh units of energy annually and save about an amount of Rs 1.37 crore for Indian Railways every year, Yadav said.

This plant at Bina is a pilot project that involves the adoption of innovative technology for converting Direct Current (DC) to single-phase Alternating Current (AC) for feeding directly to Railway’s overhead traction system.

The key challenge in this project was the conversion of DC power generated from solar panels to the single-phase 25 kV AC power which is used by the Railways traction system.

"This required the development of high capacity inverters with single phase output which was not readily available in the market. The solar panels generate DC energy which will be converted into AC energy through these unique inverters to directly feed power to the Bina Traction Sub Station, which will be used for the running of electric trains," Yadav said.

Currently, the 1.7-megawatt solar power plant is under extensive testing and likely to be commissioned in 15 days, he said.

In the coming days, the Railways plans to set up power plants with a total capacity of 2 gigawatts. Tenders have already invited for the project and in another 2 to 3 years, the project is expected to complete.