Consolidation in The Indian Solar Market

India’s solar sector has seen every Tom,Dick and Harry enter the industry as there were no requirements for previous experience in solar EPC or development. The only thing that was required was the companies put up a certain amount of capital and have a net worth. This led to massive competition for every solar tender (rooftop or ground mounted) as everyone wanted a piece of the exponentially growing sunrise (pun intended) industry.

A large number of small players have now got struck with small project capacities in a sector which now requires substantial expertise and scale to keep up. This has led to a large number of exists by small and medium solar developers who just want to take whatever they can and exist. Some large players such as Hero, Greenko, Renew etc. are rapidly picking up these assets as they look to further bulk up their portfolio and look to raise capital based on their book size. Some large deals such as the sale of Welspun to Tatas and SunEdison to Greenko have already taken place. There are other players who are also looking to exit the sector such as Essel , Orange and Ostro Energy.

Also, read List of Major Solar Panel Companies In India By Manufacturing Capacity

It is a good thing that consolidation is happening in the solar industry as an unserious, fly by night players were making competition irrational in the sector and leading to unsustainably low tariffs. Many of these projects ran the serious risk of turning into non-performing assets for the lenders and leading to a souring in sentiment towards the industry in the future.

Large companies with technical and financial expertise can bring sanity back to the solar industry as low-quality projects financed at very low prices were bringing a bad name to the Indian industry. India has managed to achieve the lowest capital costs in building ground-mounted solar projects (even much lower than China) thanks to low labor costs and scale. They need to use this competency to reduce the overall energy costs for the Indian economy which would lead to better lives for its citizens and also make Indian manufacturing more competitive vis-à-vis foreign countries such as USA, China which have low energy costs.

Indian solar industry still has huge potential considering that the per capita consumption of power is extremely low and hundreds of millions do not have access to electricity to date. Unlike western countries which are substituting coal and gas with renewable energy, India has organic demand which can be leveraged by the industry.