New Delhi: Eyeing major expansion in the renewable energy sector, Andhra Pradesh chief ministerN Chandrababu Naiduhas proposed a ₹28,436-crore green energy corridor to connect renewable energy power project to the central grid.

As Andhra Pradesh gears up for its ambitious target of producing 72 GW of green energy by 2029, Naidu has come up with a plan of a green energy corridor, which will include building transmission network and central substations.

According to sources, the green energy corridor will facilitate the evacuation of 11,000 MW of power from renewable energy projects and 7,000 MW from pumped storage projects and would contribute to India’s renewable energy capacity addition targets. Andhra Pradesh is facing twin challenges-the first is renewable energy generation potential and pumped storage schemes are concentrated in the Rayalaseema region and need massive transmission networks to evacuate the power while the load growth is primarily in the coastal areas where green hydrogen hubs (NTPC‘s Green Hydrogen Hub project and Greenko project), data centres and major industries are coming up. The second challenge is that major developers who had been allotted renewable energy sites in the previous regimes are yet to start work and have been squatting on land near substations. The state is unable to add fresh capacity as these projects have not yet taken off the ground.

Now, the state government has proposed an extra high tension transmission network to integrate these energy resources and transmit power to the coastal load centres.