India's new hybrid energy policy

The government has given the country’s booming renewable energy industry a serious boost. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy announced a new wind-solar hybrid policy last week that will see the installation of wind-solar-hybrid plants—where both windmills and solar panels are on the same piece of land.

So why does a hybrid policy make sense for India? The shortcomings of both wind and power generation separately. Solar and wind power both work only when their source of energy is good. Thus only when the sun shines at a particular intensity will the solar panels convert it into electricity and similarly, a relatively high windy day is needed to rotate the blades at a meaningful speed to generate current. A hybrid project helps deal with this inconsistency and power can be generated from a plant almost round the clock. The other shortcoming is land, or rather the cost and lack thereof. Apart from the cost of equipment, one of the biggest costs, like it is for most industries India, is land acquisition.