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With 5 GW of cumulative orders since 2017-18, Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Envision Wind Power is India’s top supplier of wind turbines, climbing past entrenched players such as Suzlon and Siemen Gamesa.
In 2022-23, the company booked orders worth 2 GW in India; in the current financial year, its order booking has already crossed 2.35 GW. Inder Singh Bhambra, Country Head, Business Development and Sales, told businessline that Envision is confident of booking over 3 GW of orders in 2023-24.
Most of the 5GW of turbine sales for Envision were in the last two years.
Young and successful
Envision was established in 2009 in China by entrepreneur Lei Zhang. Today, it is one of the world’s leading wind turbine companies. It began its innings in India in 2018 and secured its first order the following year for 197.5 MW, from Sprng Alt Energy (now part of Shell) in Gujarat.
This was hailed as the first success of a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer in India — previously, other Chinese players such as Sinovel and Ming Yang had failed to crack the Indian market.
However, Envision’s first step in India was not a pure success. Credit rating agency CARE, while putting Sprng Alt Energy on watch, had noted that the plant had been shut down “on account of disagreement between EPC contractor (Envision) and the company pertaining to liquidated damages to be paid by the EPC contractor owing to delay in commissioning of the project”. From December 9, 2020, the plant remained non-operational for many months.
Asked about this, the company said that the issue was quickly resolved and Sprng even gave Envision a repeat order.
This initial hiccup apart, Envision made good strides in the Indian market. “We are the largest in India in terms of order booking,” said RPV Prasad, CEO-India Region, Envision.
UB Reddy, Managing Director, Enerfra, a Bengaluru-based EPC company that built the Sprng Energy project, says the turbines reached peak capacity in just a matter of hours instead of a month required typically. Besides, the machines’ uptime has been demonstrated to be over 99 per cent, against the contracted 97 per cent. Electricity generation has been much higher — around 3.4 million kWhr annually — compared with other machines.
Initially, Envision produced turbines of a nominal capacity of 2.5 MW, but now supplies 3.3 MW machines from its nacelle making plant in Pune. It recently commissioned its first blade manufacturing plant in India, at Tiruchy, Tamil Nadu.
Envision’s marquee customers include ReNew, Sembcorp, Vibrant Energy and Serentica Renewables.
Bhambra said Envision’s 3.3 MW turbine is good for low wind-speed regimes. This is significant because, to step up wind power capacity from 44 GW to 100 GW by 2030, India must expand into less windy sites such as Odisha.
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