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Bidur / Trishuli 25 MWp Solar Farm

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Registry record
Updated
2026-05-13

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Nepal's first utility-scale NEA-EPC, NEA-owned, NEA-operated solar plant. 25 MWp ground-mounted grid-tied PV at Bidur, Nuwakot district, commissioned 2022 under the World Bank Grid Solar and Energy Efficiency Project. Interconnected to the Trishuli 33 kV grid.

The plant that moved Nepal from "solar demonstration" to "utility solar." Every subsequent NEA solar programme decision rides on the engineering, procurement, operational, and commercial precedents this project established.

Summary

Bidur / Trishuli is a 25 MWp NEA-owned utility-scale solar plant in Nuwakot commissioned in 2022. The page tracks its role as Nepal's first NEA-EPC utility solar precedent and as an early near-hydro, grid-adjacent solar siting case.

Specifications

Item Value
Capacity 25 MWp (DC) / ~22 MWac
Location Bidur Municipality, Nuwakot District, Bagmati Province
Site elevation ~600 m
Land area ~25 ha (approx. 1 ha/MWp)
Technology Crystalline silicon, fixed-tilt ground-mount
Inverters String inverters (typical Phase II Nepal configuration)
Interconnection Trishuli 33 kV substation, adjacent to existing NEA infrastructure
Owner NEA
EPC Selected through competitive procurement under WB Grid Solar & EE Project
Commissioning 2022
Expected annual generation ~40 GWh/yr (CF ~18%)
Actual FY 2023/24 generation ~38–42 GWh (NEA internal records; published aggregate)
Financing IDA concessional credit via World Bank Grid Solar and Energy Efficiency Project

Institutional firsts

  1. First NEA-EPC utility solar. Broke the "NEA can't build anything beyond hydro" narrative.
  2. First use of the now-standard NEA utility-solar PPA / O&M template. Subsequent IPP plants use descendant documentation.
  3. First integration of a utility solar plant into NEA's operational dispatch / Load Dispatch Center. The forecasting and integration protocols piloted here.
  4. First competitive solar EPC tender at utility scale. Established the procurement reference for Phase IV.

Why Bidur/Trishuli sited at Nuwakot is strategically interesting

The site choice is a near-hydro co-location precedent without the explicit "hybrid" label. Trishuli hydropower station is ~5 km upstream; the Trishuli 33 kV substation into which Bidur/Trishuli feeds is the same substation used by multiple Trishuli-corridor hydropower projects.

This is an early example of Hybrid Siting Logic's Archetype 1 — shared interconnection between solar and hydro — even though Bidur/Trishuli was not tendered or designed as an explicit hybrid. The economics worked because the land was available, the grid was already there, and the terrain was workable.

Site characteristics

Parameter Value
GHI (measured, nearest station class) ~4.5 kWh/m²/day
Specific yield (actual) ~1,600 kWh/kWp/yr
Zone (Solar Resource Geography of Nepal) Zone C2 — Pokhara / Gandaki mid-hills edge
Monsoon cloud penalty ~30% (mid-hill location, moderate)
Winter GHI ~4.0 kWh/m²/day

Nuwakot's mid-hill location is not Nepal's best solar zone — Zone B Terai would produce ~10–15% more per MWp. The site choice reflects transmission-adjacency priority (Trishuli 33 kV proximity) over pure GHI optimisation. The decision is instructive: for Nepal, grid-adjacency beats resource-optimisation in siting priority, which aligns with the Hybrid Siting Logic general rule.

Operational performance (FY 2023/24 + FY 2024/25)

  • Expected specific yield: 1,600 kWh/kWp/yr (design)
  • Actual specific yield: ~1,520–1,680 kWh/kWp/yr (within ±5% of design)
  • Availability: high; no recorded extended outages in FY 2023/24
  • O&M: NEA in-house, with WB Grid Solar & EE Project technical assistance during initial years
  • Monsoon degradation risk: moderate; 2023 monsoon cycle included no damage events

What this project teaches

Three lessons forward:

1. NEA can build solar on-schedule, on-budget, on-spec.

Bidur/Trishuli was delivered within the planned window and within the WB-project cost envelope. The "NEA procurement takes forever" critique (accurate for large hydro) was not validated here. Utility solar is fundamentally easier to deliver than hydropower; lead times of 3–5 years for NEA-EPC and 2–3 years for IPP are achievable.

2. Near-hydro siting works operationally.

Shared substation utilisation, shared access road, shared O&M community, no measurable operational interference between hydro and PV. This supports the Hybrid Siting Logic Archetype 1 thesis at 25 MWp scale and provides a comparator for operating hydropower sites with adjacent buildable land.

3. Mid-hill solar is workable but sub-optimal.

The ~30% monsoon penalty means a Zone C plant like Bidur/Trishuli produces ~10% less annual energy per MWp than a Zone B Terai plant of the same design. Bidur/Trishuli's site choice is best read as a grid-adjacency case, while the 960 MW tender reflects a Terai-weighted utility-solar siting model.

Limitations & Controversies

The page combines published source context with internal or aggregate operating references, so plant-level generation, availability, and O&M performance should be checked against NEA project records before citation. The mid-hill siting discussion is useful as a precedent but should not be read as a full least-cost siting analysis.

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