Gujarat's solar flair - Power Engineering

At a time when fast depleting reserves of conventional fuels like coal have almost paralysed the country's power sector, Gujarat's big bang entry into the solar power space recently couldn't have come a day earlier. And once again, with its by now familiar agility in seizing the first-mover advantage in any new promising pasture, Gujarat has found its place in the sun-literally-in the solar energy arena much faster than other states.

Apart from being one of the few power-surplus states in the country, thanks to a slew of power projects that were set up when the going was good, and a nimble state electricity board, Gujarat has already emerged as the largest solar power producer in India, producing two-thirds of the nation's total solar power generation of nearly 900 MW. To give the state's political establishment credit where it is due, it saw the looming crisis in the energy sector before even the Centre did and had announced its solar policy in 2009 itself, way before the Centre's Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission.