A 25 MW solar power plant floating on a reservoir in Andhra Pradesh should be exciting enough. What excites me, even more, is that the entire design was done by government-owned BHEL - the design had to adhere to the unique requirements of anchoring the support structures without touching or loading, either the reservoir floor or the bund structure.
This may not be rocket science, and sure, others have done it before - China has a floating solar power plant that is over 300 MW in capacity - but this is still fairly new territory.
I’m not an idealist to believe that Indian companies have been great at tech innovation - we perhaps have the potential, but we really do not have much to show as proof. Government-owned companies, despite reasonable amounts of R&D budgets, have not shown much of their innovation mettle in many domains.
I feel domains such as floating solar are sweet spots for many Indian firms to innovate - these are not deep tech, but tech that is still in fairly early stages and tech that can have a significant future potential within India. All these will make investments into these domains much easier for both private and government-owned firms.
