Sarvesh Kumark, Chairman of Indian Wind Turbine Manufacturers’ Association, is confident that wind power installations in India will cross the 5,000-MW-mark. The previous high was 3,472 MW of fresh capacity set up in 2015-16.
The Association’s General Secretary, D V Giri, is a shade less optimistic. While 5,000 MW is not impossible, he says, upwards of 4,500 MW is certain.
Year-end installations5, 000 MW is a heady number — just two years back the sector struggled to achieve half of it. In the first ten months of the financial year, till January, the sector added 2,094 MW, which means close to 3 GW would need to be put up in just two months.
However, a rush of activity towards the end of the year is not uncommon, as power producers hurry to finish the projects by March, so that they could avail themselves of the depreciation benefits and also be ready for the peak winds of summer. In 2015-16 installations of 3,472 MW, as much as 1,700 MW came in March alone.
Further, the ‘generation-based incentive’ scheme, under which the government gives 50 paise a kWhr of electricity generated by wind turbines, expires this March. Year-end installations will therefore peak, as developers rush to meet the March deadline.
This year, the highest installations are likely to come from Andhra Pradesh, around 2,500 MW, Sarvesh Kumar said. Gujarat (around 1,000 MW) and Karnataka (700 MW) were the bigger markets this year.
Industry insiders feel that 2017-18 will be good too. One reason is that an additional demand for 1,000 MW will come from the ‘competitive bidding’ process that is under way, through which some developers will win mandates to sell wind power to the government-owned Solar Energy Corporation of India.
At the end of January, India had 28,871 MW of wind capacity.
It ranks fourth in the world after China (145,362 MW), US (74,470 MW) and Germany (44,947 MW). The government aims to see 60,000 MW by 2022.