Gujarat with the backing of Bill Clinton will give our contracts worth $10 billion

Contracts to build the world’s largest solar power facility in India’s Gujarat state, valued at $10 billion and backed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, will be awarded by January, a state government official said.

The 3,000 megawatt project will get help with logistics and finding financing from the William J Clinton Foundation , a charitable group started by the former president, said S. Jagdeesan, principal secretary, energy and petrochemicals in the government of Gujarat. The foundation and the Gujarat government signed a preliminary agreement on Sept. 8.

“The Clinton Foundation will help us in bringing manufacturers and power generators and also in providing access to international funding at cost-effective interest rates,” Jagdeesan said in an interview. “They are facilitators. We will invest in the infrastructure.” The project may be developed on 10,000 hectares of land spread across three locations within an area of 150 square kilometers (58 square miles) in Gujarat.

India has joined China in trying to reduce emissions and dependence on coal by betting on alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. The Indian government is working on a National Solar Mission that envisages putting up 20,000 megawatts of solar power capacity by 2020.

India receives the equivalent of 5,000 trillion kilowatt hours of solar energy a year, the government said response to a parliament question in February. At present, the country has just 2.1 megawatts of installed solar power capacity.

China

First Solar Inc, a U.S.-based renewable energy company, announced this month it will build a 2,000-megawatt solar plant in China. One megawatt is sufficient to power a 10-storey office building.

The Clinton Climate Initiative, a part of the foundation, will help identify manufacturers of solar thermal equipment, which uses the sun’s rays to heat a medium such as water to turn turbines. The manufacturers will be selected in three to four months, Jagdeesan said.

The Gujarat government will set up the so-called solar parks in special economic zones and encourage equipment suppliers to set up manufacturing facilities close to the generation site to reduce costs, he said.

“Three-thousand megawatts is huge,” said Keith Hays, director of research atEmerging Energy Research in Barcelona, Spain. “Most solar thermal projects we’ve seen are several 100 megawatts. With solar thermal, you get more megawatts per square hectare of land” compared with other technologies to harness the sun’s energy such as photovoltaic, he said.

Cheap Financing

The project will take a minimum of five years to develop and the Gujarat government hopes to get cheap financing from multilateral agencies such as the Asian Development Bank, Jagdeesan said.

The state government may include hybrid plants in the project that use both solar energy and natural gas to generate power, Jagdeesan said.

“When there is sunshine we’ll generate using solar and when the sun is not shining we’ll generate using natural gas,” he said. “Gas is available to us in Gujarat. We will provide gas connectivity.”

The Gujarat government, headed by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, has taken the lead among Indian states in promoting solar power. It has allotted 716 megawatts of solar generation capacity to 34 Indian and international developers, apart from the Clinton Foundation-backed plan. The developers include Arlington, Virginia-based AES Solar Energy Ltd., a joint venture between AES CORP. and Riverstone Holdings LLC, and Spain’s ABENGOA

“Gujarat is the only state to take this initiative, while many people have just talked about renewable energy,”Ira Magaziner, chairman of the Clinton Climate Initiative, was cited as saying in the government press release announcing the agreement.

The Clinton Foundation focuses on issues such as AIDS, poverty and climate change.