State’s First Petrol Station Run on Solar: The 2013 Andhra Pradesh Press That Opened the Forecourt

1. What the cuttings actually said

By Kunwer Sachdev (Founder & Managing Director, 1988–2018)

On 27 April 2013 the company Facebook page posted a collage of newspapers. The New Indian Express: “State’s First Petrol Station Run on Solar Power Opens in Nalgonda Dist.” The Hindu: “First of its kind solar power back-up at petrol pumps.”

The Su-Kam Community caption listed the papers that carried it: The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Surya, Namaste Telangana, The Hans India, The Times of India, The Hindu Business Line, Sakshi, Andhra Jyoti, Prajashakti, Hindi Milap. That is how a commercial idea becomes a public record — not a brochure, a stack of dailies.

From those cuttings, not from memory: a solar backup plant at Kodad in Nalgonda district (Express also names the Tirumala Filling Station and eight-hour power cuts). A second site at Shadnagar in Mahabubnagar district, an Indian Oil pump. The Hindu’s package: a 2 kW plant, 5 kVA Solar PCU, 2,000 W of panels, eight tubular batteries — sized to the complete forecourt load. Express put the Kodad plant at about ₹2 lakh, with a 25-year panel warranty. Another 3 kVA package with 2,000 W panels and eight batteries is mentioned for a second pump. The Hindu quotes Ashish Setia, then general manager of Su-Kam’s solar business. I was MD. The PCU on that forecourt was the product line I had built. This page does not claim I stood at Kodad with the reporter.

Why this was hard

A petrol pump was not a lighting load. When a dispenser motor starts, the jerk current is very high, and each pump’s starting current is different. That is the problem we had already learned on inverter backup in 2009. Solar on the same forecourt had to swallow that surge without tripping, then run the rest of the load — lights, office, the other nozzle — from panels and tubular batteries. The Hindu’s line that the solution powered the pump “to cater to the complete power load” is that claim in print.

We were the first company to solarize petrol pumps in various parts of India. The 2013 Andhra Pradesh dailies called Kodad first of its kind in the state. After that, every company copied the technology and started selling. The dispenser jerk current, the solar-priority PCU, the idea that a forecourt did not need a generator for the daytime load — that stack was ours first.

Larger stations used a different cabinet: the Colossal 3P 80 kVA / 360 V PCU — three-phase, grid in, 30 batteries of 150 Ah / 12 V (1.8 kWh each) in series, load and charge at the same time, petrol pump on the output. That diagram is the architecture for a full forecourt, not the 5 kVA Kodad package in The Hindu.

2. What else sat in the same Hindu box

The same Hindu story, in the sidebar, named work still in the pipeline: a 10 kV rooftop solar project for a hospital in Warangal, and a 5 HP solar water pump with dual-axis tracking at Shamshabad. The Warangal hospital later appears in the recovered company blog as Lalitha Nursing Home, Parkal — 10 kW archive page. That is a separate story. This post stays with the petrol pumps.

3. Ground record from the 2013 cuttings

4. Hub

• Episode 6 — Panipat / Sanoli, June 2015
• Episode 5 — Jalgaon 10 kVA, three dispensers, starting-current problem
• 2009 recovered archive — Petrol Pumps Powered by Su-Kam
• Facebook Archive
• Warangal 10 kW hospital — named in the same Hindu sidebar
• Episode 2 — Assam Rifles

Historical Documentation Notice:
This article documents historical products and press coverage from the tenure of Kunwer Sachdev as Founder & Managing Director of Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. (1988–2018). He exited in 2019 under the IBC process and holds no association with Su-Kam or its subsequent management. Specs and site names above are taken from the recovered April 2013 newspaper collage, not from later catalogues.