ITC Limited has commissioned its first offsite solar plant in Dindigul, Tamil Nadu. The 14.9 MW solar plant, built at an investment of Rs 76 crores, will help reduce CO2 emissions over the course of its lifetime.
The plant has already helped ITC to achieve the rare feat of meeting 90% of its electricity requirement from renewable sources in the state of Tamil Nadu.
Spread over a sprawling fifty-nine acres, the solar plant in Tamil Nadu is built with the latest in solar technology and complies with all national and international standards on design and safety. The unit will generate over twenty-two million units of renewable energy annually for ITC’s hotels, food manufacturing plants, paper manufacturing facility, and printing and packaging factories in Tamil Nadu.
The company in a statement said that this new project is in line with ITC Chairman Sanjiv Puri’s ‘Sustainability 2.0’ Vision, a comprehensive goal-based agenda that raises the bar for sustainability performance. This bold Vision calls for inclusive strategies that can support even more livelihoods, pursue newer pathways to fight climate change, support circular economy and enable the transition to a net-zero ecosystem. As a part of this Vision, ITC plans to meet 100 percent of the entire grid electricity requirements from renewable sources by 2030 and contribute meaningfully to combat the threat of climate change.
Commenting on this new project, Sanjiv Rangrass, Group Head – ITC Life Sciences & Technology, Central Projects, EHS & Quality Assurance, ITC Ltd. stated, “At ITC, we have relentlessly pursued a mission for environmental stewardship through a gamut of large-scale endeavours that comprehensively address the threat of climate change. Our large-scale investments in renewable energy assets are an integral part of our low carbon strategy aimed at making a meaningful contribution to a net zero economy”.
ITC’s renewable portfolio comprises 138 MW of wind power plants and 14 MW of Solar plants with 53MW of additional solar capacity under execution. Currently, projects are also underway in other sources of renewable energy like biomass boilers.
The Company has made investments of over Rs. 1000 crores in renewable energy assets to date. Renewable energy powers twenty factories, nine hotels, and six office buildings of ITC in Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, Haryana, West Bengal, and Punjab.