Five Indian Oil And Natural Gas PSUs To Contribute To International Solar Alliance's Corpus Fund

In a push for the solar energy adoption amongst the members of the India and France led International Solar Alliance (ISA), five state-owned oil and natural gas public sector undertakings (PSUs) will become the ISA's corporate partners and contribute to its corpus fund, reports Financial Express.

Though it is still unclear how much the five PSUs will contribute to the ISA fund, several other PSUs like NTPC, PGCIL, REC, PFC, CIL and PFC had contributed a million dollars each towards the ISA's corpus in the past.

The five oil and natural gas PSUs which will be contributing funds to ISA's corpus to drive the growth of solar energy adoption include ONGC, IOCL, BPCL, HPCL and GAIL (India). The announcement about this development was made by Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan who also shared that going ahead, the energy PSUs will be focusing more on green investments like renewables, biofuels and hydrogen.

Speaking at the first-ever World Solar Technology Summit organised by ISA, Pradan also said that his ministry had taken up the mission to solarise about half of the fuel stations owned by the public sector oil companies in the course of coming five years.

It should be noted that other than the contributions from various PSUs, India has already put in $26 million for the creation of ISA's corpus, building infrastructure and meeting day to day recurring expenditure of the organisation till FY22. In 2018, the government had also announced about $1.4 billion worth of lines of credit for the implementation of 27 solar projects across 15 countries.

ISA is a treaty-based intergovernmental organisation headquartered in India and plans to mobilise more than $1,000 billion of investments by 2030 to promote solar technology in countries lying between the tropics of cancer and capricorn.