Including projects under construction and in bidding stages, India has achieved its goal of installing 175 GW renewable capacity by 2022, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has said.

The country installed 643.66 MW of renewable energy capacity during May, taking the cumulative installed renewable capacity to 95.66 GW, the Ministry said in a monthly note made public on Tuesday.

This includes about 41 GW of solar, 39 GW of wind, 10 GW of bio-power and 5 GW of small hydro capacity.

“Further projects of 50.89GW capacity are at various stages of implementation. Projects of 29.52 GW capacity are under various stages of bidding,” the Ministry said. The total renewable capacity from the installed to bidding stages comes to 176.07 GW.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the run up to the 2015 Paris climate summit, had announced India’s goal of ramping up renewable capacity to 175 GW by 2022.

The International Energy Agency has forecast that India will add 17 GW renewable capacity in 2021 and 19.3 GW in 2022, with the total still under 140 GW by 2022.

Renewable capacity additions in the country declined by almost 50 per cent in 2020, the IEA said in a May report. “Growth is set to rebound and renewable expansion is expected to set new records by 2022, driven by the commissioning of delayed projects. However, the current surge in Covid-19 cases in India has created short-term uncertainty for 2021,” it said.

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