Department of Electrical and Electronics had organised a visit for the faculty to the newly installed Solar Power Plant Site of Cochin International Airport Ltd on November 18, 2015. Cochin International airport, the country’s first greenfield airport built under public private partnership is a trendsetter and a path- breaker in aviation infrastructure development.It is the first airport in the world that completely operates on solar power.
The total plant capacity is 12 MWp, comprising of 46,150 solar panels laid across 45 acres of land. The power plant is producing approximately 60,000 units of electricity per day to be consumed for all its operational functions, which technically makes the airport ‘ absolutely power neutral’. The project components include PV modules of 265Wp capacity manufactured by Renesola, and Inverters of 1MW capacity manufactured by ABB India.This is a grid connected system without battery storage. Here CIAL gives as much power it produces in day time to KSEB and buy back the power from during night.
The DC output produced by the plant is fed in to an inverter which converts DC to AC. There are 10 inverters of 1MW capacity. The outputs of these inverters are connected to transformer where the voltage is stepped up and is fed to 110/11kV substation. From the substation power is distributed to the required areas of the airport.
