India will install 20 GW of wind energy capacity over 2021-25, according to the India wind energy market outlook released by Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) on Thursday.

About 90 per cent of this capacity addition will come from Central tenders, followed by corporate procurement and lastly State markets, GWEC said.

India currently has a pipeline of 10.3 GW in Central and State markets, which is expected to drive installations until 2023 in the market. The market post 2023 is likely to be driven by 10 GW of new capacity awards to wind, majorly in hybrid formats, GWEC said.

Hybrid volume

The linking of utility-scale wind and solar technology will be a crucial lever for the volumes, it added. Over the past two years, wind capacity awarded by the Centre fell from a high of 6.4 GW in 2018 to 1 GW in 2020. Volume awarded through hybrid tenders, however, has risen from 0.8 GW in 2018 to 2.8 GW in 2020.

“Notification of new tenders and pricing fitment of the hybrid tender will remain crucial for the opening of hybrid volume,” the outlook said.

In its previous outlook, GWEC had anticipated 2020 to be a break-out year for wind installations owing to the large pipeline and policy interventions to ease execution bottlenecks.

“The advent of the auction regime in 2017 led to large orders but also impacted prices, evacuation availability, and land preference for the projects. In early 2020, many policy interventions took place to iron out the execution bottlenecks,” it said.

However, nearly six months were wiped out due to Covid-19. “Only 1.1 GW was realised; and nearly 0.8-1 GW of capacity scheduled for commissioning in the year slipped into 2021. Also, around 1.1 GW of capacity was backed out by developers or not granted date of commissioning extensions, against the outlook of 3.3 GW,” GWEC added.

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