Back in 2010, Anmol Jaggi was one of the key names in the carbon credit market, advising large corporates on how to be energy-efficient and making money from it. With close to 25 million carbon credits and around 400 clients in India, his company was in its heyday since its launch in 2007.
Then, the carbon credit market crashed and so did the growth plans. Resurrecting itself with solar power, his Gensol group (with two promoters, Anmol and Puneet Jaggi) has grown to be the largest entity in solar design & engineering (D&E) consultancy, along with 2,000 megawatts (Mw) of solar power operations & management (O&M) projects. The company has half the market in solar consulting and the clients include noted players such as Greenko, Essel Infra, Suzlon, China Light & Power, ReNew Power and Shapoorji Pallonji.
"With an almost similar set of clients with whom we worked for carbon credits, we forayed into solar. We were consultants for most of the first movers in the solar energy market," Anmol Jaggi told Business Standard. He adds that out of the 14 gigawatts (Gw) of installed solar projects in India, Gensol has designed and engineered nearly 6.5-Gw ventures.
Their background in the energy sector gave them a natural advantage, besides being based out of Ahmedabad, said Jaggi. "We tapped into the initial growth that came in solar from Gujarat and then proceeded to other parts of India," he explained, while adding that falling rates had put a lot of pressure on project design on healthy returns.
Gensol's annual revenue has been Rs 75 crore for the past three years and it aims to increase to Rs 100 crore this year. Jaggi says they don't need external funding. "We have invested in the right areas. We are a profitable and doing reasonably well. We are sufficiently funded at present," he said.
The second major business Gensol does is O&M for solar power projects. "In the solar value chain, it is usually the most neglected part. While the company builds the project, maintenance is hardly an area of prime focus. We sensed an opportunity and decided to pursue it," said Jaggi.
For this, Gensol entered into a joint venture with Solarig, a Spanish company with global O&M experience of 1.2 Gw. "More than financial engineering, technology and project engineering would be the game changer in the Indian solar industry. As companies compete to bring down power cost, investment in an efficient system is the key to healthy returns," said Jaggi.
He said the O&M market was seeing 50-60 per cent growth on a quarter-on-quarter basis. However, the domestic solar energy market was stagnant, he said.
Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, the Jaggi brothers have incubated six small ventures. These include Prescinto Technologies that provides supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) services. SCADA is used to remotely monitor power demand and supply, and control these.
"D&E is 70 per cent of our business; O&M is around 28 per cent; and SCADA is the new segment, accounting for only two per cent so far. We are expecting to increase our revenue share with the SCADA business to 15-16 per cent by the next six to eight months. We aim to be at over a 30-35 per cent margin in our existing business by 2019, with D&E, O&M, SCADA and energy storage businesses," said Jaggi.
Now foraying into the business-to-consumer segment (B2C), Gensol has launched a product and services aggregator website for solar energy. Calling it "much more than Amazon" for solar products, the brothers have launched 'Ezysolare', an online marketplace for solar equipment installers, and Ezybox, a mobile, solar-powered inverter.