World's First Solar Airport Generates More Power Than It Consumes

More than 46,000 solar panels have been laid out across 45 acres of land to fuel the operations of Cochin airport, India’s fourth largest in terms of international passenger traffic.
Officials at the airport in the south-western state of Kerala say it will now be “absolutely power neutral”—and will even produce an excess that will boost the state’s electricity grid.
The project’s designers say between 50,000 and 60,000 units of electricity will be supplied each day by the 12 megawatt plant, commissioned by the German multinational engineering and electronics company Bosch at a cost of US$9.5 million.
“When we realized the scale of our power bill, we looked at various possibilities,” says V.J. Kurian, Cochin International’s managing director.
Sustainable Model
“We consume around 48,000 units of power a day. So if we can produce the same by strictly adhering to the green and sustainable model of infrastructure development we always follow, we can send a message to the world.
“Now this has become the world’s first airport that fully operates on solar power. In fact, we are producing a few megawatts of extra energy, which is being contributed to the state’s power grid.”
India, which relies heavily on coal-fired power plants for its energy, is the world’s fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs), sending nearly 1.3 million tonnes into the atmosphere each year. China is the world’s biggest polluter, with annual GHG emissions of more than six million tonnes.
Other airports in India are now being urged by the government to follow Cochin’s lead. The Netaji Subash Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata, West Bengal is already planning to set up a 15 megawatt solar plant on 60 acres of land.
Around the world, other airports are adopting solar power to run all or part of their ground operations.
Cost-Effective
A new international airport in Mexico City aims to be the world’s most sustainable when completed in 2018. The revamped Terminal 2 at London Heathrow airport has many solar features integrated into its operations. And Denver International is one of a number of U.S. airports utilizing solar power plants.
Cochin International says its new solar plant, which began operations in mid-August, is cost-effective, very efficient—and has attracted widespread attention.
The airport’s public relations manager, P.S.Jayan, told Climate News Network: “During the inauguration of the airport service, schoolchildren visited to see how solar energy is used to operate the entire airport facility.
“We have received many requests from schoolteachers who want to send their students here to learn about renewable energy.”
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<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
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