Viz-A-Viz with Pradeep Sangwan, Vice President & Country Head, Renesola Power Pvt Ltd

Q. As a developer, what are the major problems that you face in present scenario? How you deal with them?

We are developing projects under third party private PPA’s. Although there is a good potential in India for developers in third party PPA’s (Open Access) but due to

a. Approvals from state nodal agencies & Discoms.

b. Absence of Proper Financing Mechanism

c. Availability of Land and Its acquisition / Possession

d. Evacuation of Power / connectivity

e. Threat of change in Solar Policies.

We assign work to consultants for specific processes and dealings with third party / stake holders to avoid issues and conflicts. This helps in speeding up the process.

Q. Considering the land scarcity in the country, how do you manage to arrange land for the solar power plants and what hinders the process?

We primarily focus on states where the state government’s policies for Solar Power plants are quite clear.

We identify land suitable for solar projects and acquire it through land aggregators. As Land is a state subject in India, every state has different land policy and land holding patterns also vary. As stake holders are multiple (land owners / registration authorities), we use consultants and land aggregators to address and solve the issues encountered during land acquisition process. This helps in speed up the process as responsibilities are distributed and not centric.

Q. Please elaborate the kind of approach you follow for keeping the development process as productive as possible? Keeping today’s industrial headwinds in view, would you change this approach in the near future?

To keep our development process productive, We take up every part of process a separate project i.e PPA/Land/ Connectivity/EPC with clear timeline & cost targets. India moving fast to become the largest solar market globally, the approach has to be dynamic as the consumer demand/ expectation and competition also changing with growth. Moreover the Indian government’s solar policies also keep changing making developers to change their approach.

Q. Indian industries since long have been dealing with the issue of substandard qualities citing lack of next generation technology. Does this prevail in the solar industry also? Do you rely upon domestic or imported products in terms of quality?

Aggressive tariff bid’s (in government as well as private solar power project bid’s) is leading to cutting the cost of EPC, resulting in projects commissioning with substandard / low quality products as well workmanship. We are a global project developer and follow our global quality standards in materials as well as workmanship. We are using modules manufactured by ReneSola Group Company or top Tier 1 module manufacturers to ensure that the projects performance is not compromised.