Lesson learnt in class 4 can help save lakhs

Lesson learnt in class 4 can help save lakhs
Ashok Paranjape writes how rising fuel costs are forcing the industries to the advantage of solar energy technology
Ashok Paranjape, Managing Director, Clique Solar
Lessons last a lifetime and some of them help you make money too. This one is a little different. This becomes an industry and helps others make money (through savings) and saves the environment too.
The lesson is when sun rays are focused at a certain area, the concentration of these rays generates high temperatures at the focal point. And if this heat is generated on a large scale, from morning to evening by tracking the sun, it can be used in industrial processes for catering to their thermal energy requirements.These concentrated sun rays can generate steam that can be augmented with the existing conventional boilers in the industry, converting them into solar boilers for a fair part of the year. It is called Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST); and yes, we call it an industry.
The heat generated through steam and thermal oil finds applications across industries. Industrial sectors such as food processing industries (dairy industry, beer industry, sea food processing industry and sugar industry), textile processing industry, pharmaceutical industry, pulp and paper industry, chemical industry, auto component industry etc. have large requirement of thermal energy in their manufacturing plants. Table 1 will give some idea of the processes which use thermal energy in these industries.
Applications in community cookingMany religious places as well as schools and colleges across the country provide meals to devotees and students respectively. Many of them have community cooking facilities which use high-cost fuels like LPG. Solar energy can be used to substitute the use of these fuels.
Comfort cooling applicationsSolar-assisted cooling systems use the thermal energy of solar radiation captured through solar concentrators to power thermally driven cooling machines. As many cooling loads — such as air conditioning — have a high coincidence with the availability of solar irradiation, the combination of solar thermal and cooling obviously has a high potential to replace conventional cooling machines based on electricity. Cooling and air conditioning is one of most energy intensive processes amongst the various energy consuming applications. Any technology that can help save energy in the cooling and air-conditioning applications can help reduce India’s power shortage burden to a great extent.
What facilitates this application?The answer lies in the question: what is important to clients?
The important factors boil down to a good all inclusive word called relevance. The definition of relevance from clients’ perspective can have many meanings: cost, technology, performance, location (space), other challenges etc.
With experience of over a decade and a half of engaging with clients, I can comfortably define the relevance for the clients in the following categories:•Performance •Addressing practical challenges •Cost.
Performance Applicability of CST technologies is directly dependent on two factors:•Can the CST technology deliver temperature or pressure required by the process?•Can it do so accurately and consistently?

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