India Wants To Auction 4 GW of Wind Power Tenders In 2017 But Who Will Buy
Softbank Plans To Start An Electric Vehicle Leasing Company To Seed EV Taxis
April 27, 2017India's Solar Lacks What China Has!
May 1, 2017Is India’s 4GW of central auctions even feasible?
India has reached a position of surplus power at the current point of time with most states facing the problem of excess power. Though hundreds of millions of people live in darkness without access to electricity, there is a problem of excess power. The reason is that most people in India are too poor to buy sufficient energy for their needs. The per capita consumption of power in India is abysmally low as compared to developed countries. The problem is also in the last mile delivery of power by the state-owned distribution companies which do not have the money to buy power and sell to many people at below costs.
Most Indian states have stopped signing PPAs for new wind power projects under high prices (FITs) ever since the central Indian auction of wind power showed wind tariffs touching a substantial new low price of just 5 cents/kWh. Wind power players are now in a peculiar situation and are crying hoarse as demand has come to a sudden stop as everyone recalibrates on what they need to do. While some are gung-ho, others such as IWTMA are begging the government to reinstate incentives such as GBI and AD not understanding that their days of profiteering are over.
While the Indian government recently announced that they might go for another 4 GW of central auctions (much below the 6 GW wanted by the industry), the problem of who they are going to sell this power persists. With so much excess capacity in the country at this point of time, it makes sense for the country to not waste any more money by putting up new power plants whether solar, wind or coal. It would make better sense to utilize the existing assets where a lot of money has already gone in without investing billions of dollars in new plants or in building/ upgrading transmission infrastructure. While some bit of new builds can be done putting up gigawatts of new wind power may not make sense for the Indian government at this point in time.
2 Comments
Sneha i think there is still huge need of power in India. You see there is need to make infrastructure for that. For example : 1. Running all trains on electricity.
2. Closing all coal and diesel power plants.
3. Hybrid and Electric cars will be on road in next 10 yrs. Need electric charge stations.
4. As life style of people changes there will be increase in the demand of power. During hot months in north india power demand increase 3 folds.
5. New smart cities to come. More airports more industries. more entrepreneur more companies etc there will be a requirement of power.
6. Excess power can be exported to nations like pakistan , nepal, myanmar etc.
Hi Sneha,
If we talk about wind energy, the generation is not constant throughout the year. It varies with high wind season and low wind seasons. And that too only 7-8 states are available for wind projects.
Not all state Discoms are surplus of energy, eastern low windy states of India need to fulfill RPO guidelines every year, so they have to buy electricity from surplus states. For that new projects have to be continued.
The problem lies in the lack of Infrastructure and complex inter-intra state charges, cross subsidies applicable for different states.
Although, government is working on corridor for seamless flow of electricity throughout the country, I feel there is lot of scope for new projects that can be installed and achieve 40 GW target of wind energy by 2022.