Rough Winds Ahead

The government has not been sympathetic to the beleaguered wind industry’s many demands, leaving it helpless.

- M Ramesh

There seems to be no end in sight to the wind industry’s travails.

At the beginning of the year, some hearts nurtured a hope that things would sort themselves out for, after all, how long can you repress an industry raring to go? But that didn’t happen.

In the first six months of the current financial year, the country saw wind capacity additions of 1,464 MW. How much would happen in the remaining part of the year?

In the past, installations have happened at a mad pace even in the last month (March). But the odds are stacked against such a feat this time around. The reason is that the main issue — land availability for projects — seems to be, at least at the moment, intractable.

So far, SECI, the government company tasked with development of wind and solar in India, has conducted eight rounds of successful auctions, for a total of 9,370 MW. In addition, there have been two auctions for wind-solar hybrid, for 1,560 MW. State governments and NTPC have bid out another 3,482 MW. In total, there have been 16 rounds of auctions; 14,412 MW of capacity has been awarded.

Of this, 5,087 MW is due to have come up by now. And by March next year, 7,587 MW of auctioned capacity should be up and running. Against this, the achievement as of today is 1,707 MW.

And, by the way, developers of all but one of the 31 projects awarded through the first five auctions of SECI (for which developers have disclosed where they intend to put up their projects) have chosen to put them up in the windiest States of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.

There are many reasons why the performance is so uninspiring, a great contrast with the year 2016-17, when the industry saw handsome installations of 5,600 MW and was looking at an extremely rosy future. But the two main reasons are: land availability and tariffs.