Solar Power in Environment Protection and Disaster Relief

The benefits of solar power are widely known and accepted for general industrial, government and consumer use. The work in this paper demonstrates the significant benefits of the use of Photovoltaic Arrays for disaster response and compares their use to the normally deployed generators (gensets) which are commonly deployed in emergency response. In this paper, we consider the case of India, which has a large population and is highly vulnerable to natural disasters.[1] The effect of an outage caused by a disaster is serious to a society, because power distribution lines are a common basic infrastructure for life support. Everything today is dependent on power be it the basic lighting or the advanced facilities such as communication, medical services, filtered water, cooking appliances, elevators and electrical motors used to sustain daily life. Modern life is difficult without power even for few hours thus quick response in providing emergency power is one of the most crucial aspects of a successful response to disasters. In this paper, we show that portable solar energy systems can be used for prompt response to disasters thus providing aid for necessities. Renewable power also helps with fossil fuel conservation which in turn can help reduce the occurrence of natural disasters. Solar technology can be provided in a mobile format, e.g. Rapid-roll [2] which unfurls solar arrays like a carpet behind a truck which can be rapidly deployed by rolling out to generate energy in the region of catastrophe. It carries the solar panels estimated to power a mobile clinic with 120 beds, it generates an average of 11KWh of energy a day, connected to batteries that can store 24KWh for non-sunshine hours. The mobile solar power can also provide refrigeration for medical supplies, water filtration systems and communication equipment that are required for recovery process. In the case when recovery lasts a long period of time, generators will need large amount of fuel which gives solar power it’s major advantage. Clearly fossil fuel emissions are increasing at fastest rate for 7 years and even though India has the solar target of 100GW by 2022 but so far only 28GW has been installed since 2011.[3] Given that India is world’s most disaster affected country and among the top 15 countries with maximum power outage[1], it is clear that solar power is best suited for disaster relief operations to provide significant relief and to reduce the risk of future disasters realizing the solar mission target.