India’s ambitious plan to achieve a renewable energy capacity of 500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 hinges on how soon and how efficiently the country can remove some bottlenecks that these projects face on the ground, Sumant Sinha, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ReNew, said.
The founder of ReNew Power, which has recently announced rebranding as ReNew, to align the brand name to its aspiration to expand the scope of business to decarbonisation from its earlier focus on power, was in Mumbai at the 3rd Energy Transitions Working Group (ETWG) meeting under India's G20 Presidency.
Sinha said that the government is “very serious” about its target of achieving 500 GW of renewable capacity by 2030, and is supporting the industry to make a “really good effort” to achieve the target.
“I cannot fault them (the government) even one bit. In fact, I must commend them for the effort they're putting in right now. But there are ground-level problems. We'll have to see how much we can therefore, actually execute. But I feel that we will, as a country, make a pretty good show of getting to that,” Sinha said.
As its commitment to combat climate change and reduce global warming, India aims to achieve 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030, which will include 140 GW from wind energy and 280 GW from solar.
Sinha pointed out that the capacity addition needed in the renewable energy sector would be even higher to factor in the needs of producing green hydrogen, another focus area of the government.
“We have to get over 425 GW of wind and solar only for the power sector. Then there is the government's target of five million tonnes of green hydrogen, which requires an additional 100-125 GW. So, if I add that to 300 GW, that takes us to an additional capacity of 400 GW by 2030.
“In the next seven years, we will actually have to add 60 GW of renewable energy capacity every year to meet our aspirations across power and green hydrogen,” he said.
Roadblocks
In January, the government revised the auction process for onshore wind energy projects, moving away from the reverse bidding mechanism which the industry has been lobbying for a long time. It also set a target to invite bids for 8 GW of wind energy projects each year till 2030 across eight states which enjoy good wind levels. The power generated from these states would be sold after pooling and arriving at an average price to ensure that states that had thus far not seen capacity addition due to high cost of generation can also set up projects.
These steps are seen as a shot in the arm for the wind energy sector which has seen slowing of capacity addition despite the government’s target of setting up 140 GW of wind energy capacity by 2030. India currently has an installed capacity of about 40 GW of wind projects.
“There are a number of issues related to land availability. It's not that easy to get land anywhere, with the possible exception of parts of Kutch or parts of Jaisalmer,” Sinha said.
“That’s why offshore wind is appealing because at some stage we will hit a natural barrier of how much can be set up onshore,” he said.
Besides land acquisition challenges, the industry may also face shortage of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) capabilities. Sinha said that the highest capacity addition India witnessed in the wind energy sector was 5 GW, calling it an aberration as the second-highest was only around 3 GW. India could do that at the time because there were many big companies like Suzlon Energy, Siemens Gamesa, GE, Inox Wind, and Vestas, among others, offering EPC services.
“The execution capability is not as much as it used to be. And now we have to step up from 5 GW to 10 GW. So, the task is double of what has ever been achieved in a year in India. On top of that, execution resources have diminished. So, that will have to be rebuilt. That will be a natural bottleneck,” he said.
India is likely to float the first offshore wind seabed lease tender in four to six weeks and the tender for projects with viability gap funding too, likely in FY24.
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