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German engineering and electronics major Bosch India will focus on setting up rooftop solar plants for its industrial clients, while remaining cautious towards utility scale projects.
“The enterprise category or industrial clients are our focus category (for setting up solar power projects). That is where we think there will be a big change over a period of time. Distributed energy generation cuts down on transmission and distribution losses and this is the game. For this, enterprise customers is the model to go for,” Venugopalan C M, Head – Energy Division, Bosch India told BusinessLine .
By the end of 2016, the company aims to double its capacity in solar energy generation.
Key projects Going beyond, it also intends to penetrate key industry sectors contributing to their energy efficiency measures.
The company’s key projects include the 1-MW solar plant for Maruti Suzuki Ltd in Manesar and the 12-MW solar project for Cochin International Airport Ltd.
Vengopalan said that the company will aim to get more airport and seaport projects to set up solar plants for such customers.
“We are doing a 4.5-MW project for the New Mangalore port. We are also in talks for another airport and a seaport. We are also looking at automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Makers) for setting up solar plants for their captive needs,” he said.
Commenting on the company’s plans to take part in bids for utility scale solar power plants, Venugopalan added, “We are taking part in some of the bids. But we are doing it very selectively. As I said, enterprise category customers are our focus category.”
Asked whether the tariffs play a part in the company focussing on the rooftop plants for enterprise customers, he agreed that for the customer savings over diesel gensets or even industrial electricity tariffs makes sense.
“Large enterprise customers have direct high tension lines coming to their plants but they are still going for green solutions like solar power plants.
“However, we are clear to the clients that rooftop solar plants are not a plain vanilla plug and play solution.
“There is a design challenge for any project. Therefore, besides tariffs we also have to remain cost competitive,” said Venugopalan.
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