Turning around India’s wind energy sector
This year’s Union Budget has largely left out the wind energy sector with no direct scheme proposed to dislodge the bottlenecks holding back the sector, according to industry analysts.
Despite a much earlier head-start, the wind sector has been overtaken by solar in the past few years. While the slow pace of wind capacity addition has impacted the indigenous supply chain, added experts.
However, the next big turnaround for the wind energy sector’s revival could be a scheme focused on re-powering old wind farms with available land in high wind potential sites but with old low capacity turbines, according to Somesh Kumar, partner and leader, power and utilities, EY India.
“The scheme needs to include a tariff mechanism that also explores some sort of compensation for the lost generation due to past shutdowns based on higher efficiencies in future,” he added.
For increasing bid participation, the competitive bidding mechanism should either remove tariff ceilings and let the market decide the tariffs or rationalise ceiling tariffs across regions based on site specific wind speed data, said analysts.
They further added that open access regulations could be used to promote tariff competitive inter-state wind energy transfer.
