The second EAI club meet of the year was held after a long hiatus on 8thMay, 2011 at the “Integree House”, Nungambakkam. People came together on a hot Sunday morning to create a very unique platform; to promote and catalyze clean renewable energy. The meet was represented widely by an eclectic mix of individuals coming together to form a community of students, professionals, industrialists, entrepreneurs and representatives from the media. The revered list of guests includes Mr. D. Murali (http://bit.ly/F4TdMurali), Deputy –editor, The Hindu Business Line, Mr. Ashok Mimani from Mimani Group, Mr. P. Bhaskar, Vellore Institute of technology, Mr. Vishwanath , Director, Rensol power, Vineeth Vijayaraghavan (http://panchabuta.com/) ,Editor , Panchabuta, among other prominent industry people.
The theme of the meet was focused towards solar energy sector. Incidentally, the previous day (7th May 2011) recorded the highest solar normal insolation producing an output of approximately 801 w/m2 of cell in Chennai. The meet was presided over by our invited speaker Mr. Victor Thamburaj from iPLON, Germany. Mr. Thamburaj is the founder and CEO of iPLON GmbH, a German based firm providing intelligent monitoring solutions to Solar PV farms. An alumnus of IIT Madras, Mr. Thamburaj has more than 5 years of practical experience in installation of large (MW size) and small scale solar PV farms (kW size) in Germany and Italy restless leg syndrome. iPLON, a revered client of EAI, has so far installed monitoring systems in more than 100 MW of Solar PV farms.
Mr. Thamburaj enlightened the audience with his wealth of experience in installing monitoring tool for over 100 MWs of Solar PV farms. He highlighted on the emerging trends in solar installations in Germany and Italy. The presentation can be downloaded from http://eai.in/ref/eve/eai_club_meet.html .From his experience in Germany, he recommended that thin film modules have a significant role in India’s solar dream as compared to the conventional crystalline solar panels. According to Mr. Thamburaj, the two main advantages of using the thin-film modules are that the frameless modules are easy to clean and the obviously low temperature co-efficient make it a front runner in terms of technology.
The key take away from his presentation was the challenges in India. Apart from periodical cleaning, Maintenance and System Servicing (MASS) coupled with Performance guarantee by the EPC provider remained the key challenges to the success of solar PV in India.
On that note, my very special thanks, on behalf of the EAI team, to Mr. Ramesh Subramaniam who gave us an ideal ecosystem for this absorbing club meet. I am eagerly looking forward to meeting you next time. For regular updates, follow us on http://www.facebook.com/IndiaEnergy .
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