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Several leaders of the Indian wind power industry today expressed their concern over the possibility of transmission capacity constraints.
They feared that capacity constraints might derail India’s ambition of installing 10 GW of wind capacity every year for the next five years. There were speaking at Windergy 2023, the annual conference of the wind industry, currently underway in Chennai.
Vipul Tuli, Chairman, South Asia, Sembcorp Industries, an energy producing company, said availability of transmission capacity has been on a “steady decline” in the last ten years. While the build-up of transmission capacity has gathered pace in recent years, he called for a legally-enforceable assurance of substation availability, to de-risk investments in renewable energy. “The question is, can we aim to have at least 30-40 GW of inter-state (cross-country) transmission capacity in windy zones,” Tuli said. He wanted the substations to be created in sync with the creation of renewable energy capacity.
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“We don’t have enough transmission capacity,” stressed Sumant Sinha, Chairman and CEO of ReNew, a renewable energy company with 17.5 GW of operating or under-construction wind and solar capacity.
Other wind industry insiders (including Inder Singh Bhambra, Country Head, Business Development and Sales, Envision Wind) said with the electricity evacuation capacity in Gujarat and Rajasthan exhausted, wind power developers were left with no option but to go to one of two substations in Karnataka – Koppal and Gadag. While there are plans to raise the evacuation capacity from these substations, it is not ideal for energy companies to crowd to the two regions.
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Both Tuli and Sinha praised the government for the assurance on 10 GW of capacity auctions every year. Sinha said availability of turbines “of the right kind” is another constraint. Tuli stressed the importance of the government sticking to the promised capacity auctions, but also cautioned the industry against over-committing itself and not being able to deliver.
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