SunEdison, a US-based solar power multinational, is setting up a ‘solar park’ in southern Tamil Nadu. The park, expected to be ready by September, will house solar power plants with capacity adding up to 18 MW.

A part of the 18 MW will be sold to investors in parcels of either 0.75 MW or 1 MW.

The investors are mostly medium-size companies engaged in other businesses, which need ‘solar investments’ to get the tax-saving ‘accelerated depreciation’ benefit.

What is not sold to investors will be owned by SunEdison, which will sell the electricity directly to (industrial) consumers under long-term power purchase agreements.

While SunEdison has no fix on how much capacity will be sold and how much owned, it expects to own about 10 MW.

The company says selling electricity is more profitable than selling plants.

At a press conference in Chennai on Tuesday, SunEdison announced that it has just sold 1.5 MW of capacity to an unnamed investor.

The company is building the 18-MW capacity using two technologies. In one, the sky-facing solar modules are fixed; in the other, they move from East to West, tracking the sun’s movement overhead to receive more sunlight.

Pashupathy Gopalan, President, SunEdison – Asia Pacific, GCC and South Africa, said that while the fixed plants generate 16 lakh units of electricity a year per MW, those using trackers generate 2.5 lakh units more.

The going rate is ₹7.8 crore per MW for fixed and ₹8.8 crore for those with trackers. Gopalan said the park was unique in the sense that the buyer of the electricity was not any Government-owned body, as is typically the case for large solar projects.

This, he said, implied that solar power was fast-becoming competitive with electricity from conventional sources such as coal.

Listing overseas

The $-2 billion SunEdison, which has just won the rights to set up 100 MW of solar power plants through a Government bidding process, plans to list some of its Indian assets on an overseas stock exchange, possibly New York.

‘Listing’ refers to the process of putting identified assets (here, solar power plants) under a separate company or a ‘business trust’ and listing either the shares of the company or the units of the trust, as the case may be. Gopalan stressed that the ‘listing’ was only a plan the company had disclosed to authorities in the US.

He said the company is in the process of identifying the underlying assets for the to-be-listed entity, which could include Indian assets.

Globally, SunEdison operates 1,900 MW of solar power plants and has another 3,000 MW in the pipeline.

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