One Solar One Grid

Subject – Environment

Context – One Sun, One World, One Grid for seamless energy

Concept –

On the second day of COP26, an initiative by India and the United Kingdom to tap solar energy and have it travel seamlessly across borders was announced.
It includes a group of Governments called the Green Grids Initiative — One Sun One World One Grid group — and was announced at COP26 by summit host United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
A Ministerial Steering Group will work towards accelerating the making of large solar power stations and wind farms in the best locations, linked together by continental-scale grids crossing national borders.
- The Ministerial Steering Group includes France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, and will also have representatives from Africa, the Gulf, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Research support for the Green Grids Initiative is being provided by the Climate Compatible Growth consortium of universities, which includes Cambridge, Imperial College, Oxford and University College London.
The Green Grids Initiative Working Groups made up of national and international agencies have already been established for Africa and for the Asia-Pacific region.
- Their membership includes most major multilateral development banks, such as the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank.

International Solar Alliance (ISA)

It is an Indian initiative that was launched by the Prime Minister of India and the President of France on 30th November 2015 in Paris, France on the side-lines of the Conference of the Parties (COP-21), with 121 solar resource-rich countries lying fully or partially between the tropic of Cancer and tropic of Capricorn as prospective members.
Objective: To collectively address key common challenges to the scaling up of solar energy in ISA member countries.
The Government of India has allotted 5 acres of land to the ISA in National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) campus, Gurugram and has released a sum of Rs. 160 crore for creating a corpus fund, building infrastructure and meeting day to day recurring expenditure of the ISA up to the year 2021-22.