Acme plans to beat eSolar on cost of solar thermal in India

India’s Acme Group said today it’s on schedule to commission part of its first 10-megawatt solar thermal plant using technology licensed from eSolar in Rajasthan in the first quarter of next year.

And Acme, which paid $30 million for a 5-percent stake in Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar in March, thinks it can achieve even better costs than eSolar, which commissioned its first commercial demonstration plant just last week (see eSolar completes 5-MW power-tower solar plant as NRG waits in wings).

See the power-tower plant here »

Acme founder Manoj Kumar Upadhyay told The Financial Express that the first 5 MW phase of the plant is expected to cost Rs 15 crore ($3.14 million) per megawatt. The subsequent 100 MW developed would bring costs down to Rs 13 crore ($2.72 million) per megawatt, and at 2,000 MW the price would drop to Rs 8 crore ($1.68 million) per megawatt.

Although part of the reduction would come with economies of scale, Upadhyay attributed the rest to India’s new National Solar Mission, which lays the framework for a feed-in-tariff and low-cost funding (see India’s new climate plan aims to set 20 GW solar goal). Those measures could reduce the cost of solar thermal power in India to power to Rs 5.80 ($0.12) per kilowatt-hour by 2015, he said.

The eSolar agreement provides Acme with an exclusive license for India to develop 1,000 MW of solar thermal projects in the next 10 years (see Solar sell-off accelerates). ESolar developed a modular, scalable solar thermal power technology that focuses thousands of mirrors on a single point to efficiently harvest the sun’s energy and reduce costs (see Cleantech Group picks winners and losers in concentrated solar thermal).

Upadhyay said his company’s costs will be lower than eSolar’s because Acme can buy boilers, turbines and mirrors from domestic manufacturers.

Acme is building a 5-MW plant in Maharashtra and has signed memorandums of understanding to build a 110-MW plant in Gujarat and a 100-MW plant in Madhya Pradesh.

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