7 JANUARY 2015: Govt to add 100MW by rooftop solar projects

Ø  The Union Urban Development Ministry has signed up for enhancing the country’s solar energy production, expecting to add 100 MW over the next two years. the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) signed a memorandum of understanding with the Solar Power Corporation of India (SPCI) to achieve the target of producing 100 MW of energy that is sufficient to power 25,000 households (with a connection of 4 KW each). The CPWD will give to the SPCI 629 buildings owned and maintained by it in 18 States for installing solar photovoltaic projects on rooftops. As per the proposal, roof-mounted solar power generation in different States will be 17 MW in Delhi, 0.80 MW in Punjab, 0.90 MW in Jammu and Kashmir, 9.30 MW in Uttar Pradesh, 1.10 MW in Uttarakhand, 43 MW in West Bengal, 1.00 MW in Jharkhand, 2.50 MW in the northeast, 1.7 MW in Maharashtra, 3 MW in Gujarat, 1.50 MW in Madhya Pradesh, 0.50 MW in Tamil Nadu, 2.60 MW in Andhra Pradesh, 3.80 MW in Karnataka, 0.70 MW in Kerala, 1.40 MW in Telangana, 6.80 MW in Rajasthan and 2.70 MW in Bihar.

 

Roof Top Solar Panel

Ø  The earthquake that set off the tsunami which caused the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster was unleashed by a stealthy nine-year buildup of pressure on a plate boundary, scientists said. Part of a fault where two mighty plates on the Earth’s crust collide east of Japan was being quietly crushed and twisted for nearly a decade. It was this hard to detect activity which caused the fault eventually to rip open on March 11, 2011 and cause the catastrophe. The deformation “increased the stress in the source region... and finally triggered the earthquake,” said study co-author Kazuki Koketsu of the University of Tokyo. “It had an impact on the occurrence time of the earthquake,” Prof. Koketsu told AFP by email. “It advanced the time [of the quake] by about one year.” The earthquake, occurring below the Pacific floor about 200 km east of the east coast city of Sendai, was one of the biggest ever recorded, measuring 9.0 on the moment magnitude scale. The sea bottom shifted by about 88 feet, causing a massive tsunami that sparked the Fukushima disaster and left 18,000 people dead or missing. The fault lies on the Japan Trench, where the Pacific plate dives beneath the North American plate on which the Japanese archipelago lies. Subduction faults like these have been responsible for some of the world’s most devastating quakes.