IMPHAL, August 2: Equipment for measuring solar radiation and associated weather parameter controlling station Solar Radiation Resource Assessment, SRRA has been installed in Manipur recently at Takyelpat inside the campus of Manipur Renewable Energy Development Agency, MANIREDA office Imphal.
According to an official source the SRRA station was installed in May 26, 2014 under the ministry of New and Renewable Energy, NRE Government of India. And its assessment is being done in collaboration with the Centre for Wind Energy Technology (C-WET) Chennai.
The SRRA station is equipped with state-of-the-art equipment or sensors for measuring solar radiation and associated weather parameters including monitoring of global solar irradiance, direct normal incidence (DNI) solar irradiance, diffused solar irradiance, wind speed and direction, ambient air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure and rainfall.
The source said that the information given by the SRRA station is very accurate and reliable; it may be on weather, wind direction, humidity, sun radiation temperature, etc.
The station is will be helpful for mega-projects taken up in the State. The equipment can cover 100 Km radius area to access solar radiation. The estimate cost of the equipment is around 35 lakhs and was sanctioned from the ministry of NRE Government of India.
The ministry of NRE has taken up the massive task with the aim of setting up 20 GW of solar power in the country by 2022 under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) to mitigate the adverse effects of environmental pollution and climate changes.
The data collected from SRRA is monitored at an interval of one second and average over a period of 1 minute.
Average data is transmitted through GPRS to a Central Receiver Station set up at C-WET, Chennai.
Associated facilities for data quality checks as per international norms and calibration facilities for various equipment or sensors used at SRRA station have also been set up in this station.
In case of any failures in mobile connectivity, provision has in-built capacity to store six months data in memory chip, which can be retrieved as and when required. Fully automatic quality control procedure is implemented in the data processing, analysis and report generation, added the official source.