The First Union Territory of India to run 100 percent on solar energy is

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Diu. In March 2018 the island of Diu — then part of the Union Territory of Daman and Diu — was declared the first Indian Union Territory to run entirely on solar energy. Diu had built roughly 13 MW of solar capacity: about 10 MW ground-mounted on some 50 acres of rocky, unused land, plus about 3 MW of rooftop plants on government buildings. Against a peak demand of only about 7 MW, that was enough for the island to stop importing power from Gujarat during daylight hours, and domestic electricity bills fell by roughly 10-12 per cent. The honest framing is the one Diu itself used: 100 per cent solar during the daytime — after sunset the island still draws on the grid, because the achievement was in generation, not in storage. Present-day note for a 2026 reader: since January 2020 Diu has been part of the merged Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, so 'Daman and Diu' no longer exists as a separate UT.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The Andaman and Nicobar Islands have long depended mainly on diesel generation, with solar and hybrid microgrids being added island by island. They were not the Union Territory credited with the first fully solar-powered milestone.  (b) Chandigarh has one of India's most aggressive rooftop-solar programmes and is often cited as a model solar city, but its solar generation meets only a part of a much larger city demand — it never claimed to run entirely on solar.  (d) Puducherry's electricity comes largely from the central grid and conventional sources; it has solar installations but no claim to being the first fully solar-powered Union Territory.

Concept: A very small, isolated power system is the easiest place to reach '100 per cent renewable', because the arithmetic is forgiving: Diu's peak load of about 7 MW could be covered by about 13 MW of panels working in strong coastal sunshine, on land that had no competing use. Scale that logic up and the difficulty appears — matching a large, round-the-clock demand needs storage or firm backup, which is why 'daytime 100 per cent' and 'always 100 per cent' are very different claims. This is the same reason small islands and UTs, not big states, tend to be the sites of renewable-energy 'firsts'.

State PCS 2019 Q29 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q29 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer