Slow growth in Wind Power in India

Despite wind power being set a target of 50 GW by 2022, which implies an annual run rate of ~5 GW every year, wind power is not growing at all in India. Wind power in India is projected to remain flat at around 2-2.5 GW every year going forward (by CARE ratings). This means that India will not meet the 175 GW target of RE by 2022, as solar power has been set an extremely ambitious target of 100 GW (which means more than 10 GW a year). So with solar power unlikely to cover up the wind energy shortfall, RE will not meet the target. The Indian government has not really pushed wind energy hard enough, as it is doing for solar energy. While the current government has reinstated the earlier incentives such as Accelerated Depreciation and GBI, it has not done anything more. The offshore wind energy policy that was passed is unlikely to bring much concrete gains in the near term. Offshore wind energy is quite costly compared to onshore wind power and with India being highly sensitive to costs, I do not think that offshore wind energy will become a meaningful contributor to the Indian power sector until the technology sees substantial improvement and costs come down a lot more to make it competitive with other fuel sources.

Wind power in India is quite competitive with coal and other sources, however its growth has been restricted to some states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, TN and others. Its growth has been tepid in other states, but the main reason is that the other states are not that developed economically. Also many of these states are rich in coal, which makes them reluctant to install wind power plants. The enforcement of RPO has been weak which means that large power consumers do not have any bid push to install wind energy capacity in their respective regions.

I think that the government will wake up and push wind energy growth as it does not require too much subsidies. However, meeting the 5 GW target will be tough especially as solar tariffs are coming down at an extremely fast rate. Solar energy helps meet the RE target and is also faster to install. However, the government already has a huge ramp up target and exceeding that target will be very difficult in my view.