Cochin International First Solar Powered Airport

Cochin International Airport located in the State of Kerala, the airport that is the one of busiest in India, handling more than 1,000 flights a week, now Cochin is the first airport in the world that ultimately uses the Sun’s energy.

Yusuf DemirCloud & Software Reporter

29 Nov 20151 min read

The project starts with 400 panels on its rooftop in 2013 when the management gets positive feedbacks about energy efficiency they decided to expand the project. Airport has over 46,000 solar panels tapping the power of the bright sunlight and converting it into energy and in August 2015 the airport became totally self-sufficient after installing a 12-megawatt solar plant. VJ Kurian, the airport’s managing director, said; it was the huge power bills that force them to install solar panels at the first place. Now in sunny days solar panels produce more energy than the airports need, the terminal only uses the state power at night-time or in rainy days.

And companies around the country want to know more about ” Cochin Model ” to use in their factories or airports, even a team from Liberia is also interested with the Cochin Model. Solar panels took six months to complete and cost about $9.5m, and Mr. Kurian thinks, solar energy panels will repay its money in less than six years.

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Yusuf Demir

Cloud & Software Reporter

Yusuf Demir is the Cloud & Software Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers cloud infrastructure, enterprise platforms, developer tools and the digital transformation of businesses in the UK and the United States. He previously reported on enterprise technology for The Register in London and covered the cloud and SaaS beat for TechCrunch, following the competition between AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the open source licensing disputes and the rise of Kubernetes. Yusuf holds an MEng in Computing from Imperial College London and speaks regularly at KubeCon and AWS re:Invent, where he moderates conversations with engineers and chief technology officers. He is most interested in the gap between vendor roadmaps and the systems engineers actually run, and in what the cloud bill looks like once the free credits expire.

All stories by Yusuf Demir (294)