The $16-billion Mahindra group is set to enter the wind power business in India.

The group is not at the moment revealing its plans, though.

“It is in a little confidential stage,” says Parag Shah, Managing Partner at Mahindra Partners and Head of Mahindra Cleantech Ventures. “It is work-in-progress,” he says, without giving out more details.

What is clear is that the group, which has major ambitions in the ‘cleantech’ space, will not get into manufacturing. That is, it is highly unlikely that there will be ‘Mahindra’ wind turbine.

As Shah put it, in another context, in a chat with Business Line recently, Mahindra “generally speaking, would not want to be technology players. We want to be good systems integrator players as there are enough good technologies across the world and you could choose horses for courses and focus on execution.”

Since Shah also said that “nothing stops Mahindra EPC” (which today builds solar power plants for customers within and outside the group) from becoming a “large green EPC player”, the idea is presumably that Mahindra would get into undertaking turnkey jobs for developing wind farms.

This rings a bell. L&T is another company that is toying with a similar idea.

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Solar Energy Corp to promote rooftop plants

After Gujarat and Karnataka, the Union Government has gotten into the ‘rooftop solar’ movement.

The government-owned, not-for-profit company Solar Energy Corporation of India has invited proposals from solar developers and ‘renewable energy service companies’ to putting up rooftop solar photovoltaic systems in various cities.

Gujarat was the first State to have had private developers (SunEdison and Azure Power) to set up rooftop solar plants across cities. Solar Energy Corporation’s scheme of things is on a much larger scale.

For starters, it wants 10 MW on pilot basis, across six cities (Delhi 1 MW, Gurgaon 2, Chhattisgarh 2, Bangalore 2, Chennai 2 and Bhubhaneshwar 1).

The pilot scheme targets large area roofs of government offices, PSUs, commercial establishments, hospitals, cold storages, warehouses, industry and educational institutions, says SECI.

Bidders could apply for any capacity between 250 kW and 2 MW, and could aggregate the capacity over several buildings.

ramesh.m@thehindu.co.in

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