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Mr Rakesh Bakshi, Managing Director, Vestas RRB India Ltd - Bijoy Ghosh

Chennai , April 5

VESTAS RRB India Ltd hopes to inaugurate its facility to manufacture blades for wind turbines before the end of this financial year. It will invest about Rs 30 crore in this facility, which will come up near Chennai.

Speaking to newspersons at the company's plant at Virugambakkam here, Mr Rakesh Bakshi, Managing Director, said that the indigenisation level of the company's wind turbines will go up to about 75 per cent with the inauguration today of a facility to make controllers, set up at a cost of Rs 3 crore.

Vestas RRB has so far been importing the controllers from Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark. It gets the blades also from Vestas, which has a 49 per cent stake in Vestas RRB.

Mr Bakshi said that local manufacture of the controllers, which are the brains of wind turbines, might not result in a reduction in price of the turbines now as the price of steel and other input costs had gone up enormously. However, with the inauguration of the blade manufacturing unit, for which the company has acquired about 18 acres, he is confident that the cost of wind turbines would come down substantially.

Vestas RRB makes wind turbines of 225 KW, 500 KW and 600 KW capacity. According to him, Vestas RRB is likely to end 2004-05 with a turnover of Rs 550 crore and hopes to achieve a turnover of Rs 1,000 crore in 2005-06. Mr Bakshi argued for a national level policy for promoting wind turbines. Currently, there is no uniformity among States in either the tariffs they paid for power generated by wind turbines or the wheeling charges.

For instance, the tariff is about Rs 2.70 a unit in Tamil Nadu but more than Rs 3 in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Likewise, Tamil Nadu charges five per cent wheeling charges, while Andhra Pradesh charges more than 20 per cent.

Unveiling a national level renewable energy policy would help India achieve its full potential from the renewable energy sector, especially windmills. It would also attract more private investment in the sector, he said.

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