Adani’s 5.2 MW Onshore Wind Turbine A Step Closer To Launch

The Adani group’s much anticipated 5.2 MW wind turbine being built at Mundhra, Gujarat, is close to a formal unveiling. Touted as  the country’s largest wind turbine and one of the largest on-shore machines in the world when ready, the machine is being built with technology from W2E Wind to Energy GmbH of Germany. Till now, even on its current wind projects, the preferred wind turbine capacity has been around 2 MW or a little higher. The group has been focused on localising sourcing for its projects, be it solar, or wind, and coming soon, green hydrogen. With a target of 45 GW by 2030, and an operational portfolio of almost 8.5 GW with group firm Adani Green Energy (AGEL), localisation was seen as vital to maintain margins.

The turbine prototype is going through extensive testing in Khavda , Gujarat, where the firm hopes to extract higher CUF from it thanks to a location advantage. Importantly, group firm AGEL saw wind CUFs slip due to lower wind speeds and the impact of Biparjoy cyclone when multiple wind farms were shut down.

Adani New Industries Limited, the company used as the vehicle for the manufacturing plans including the green hydrogen ecosystem, during the quarter the integrated manufacturing division received the provisional certificate of 5.2-megawatt prototype-1 wind turbine. Production of this is expected during this quarter. Further during this quarter, ingot and wafer facility preliminary work has commenced and the firm hopes to update at the half year results, ie, sometime in early November.

At the analyst call post its Q1 earnings, Robbie Singh, CFO, Adani Enterprises Limited said “Windtech facility has already achieved its provisional certificate, so it is up and running and is moving to commercial production. Similarly, all the ancillaries, be it glass, be it aluminum frame, back sheet, EVA, all of that are now in very advanced stages and in majority of the cases, the ancillary system is operating. There is no change in the timelines as we had indicated last year, but I think from a formally full detailed timeline on green hydrogen, the best time to update would be in May next year, but certainly on the ingot wafer and further improvement, we will provide that update with the half yearly results.”

On the Green Hydrogen ecosystem, he added ” (On) the electrolyzers, all the agreements in relation to the technologies are in place and we expect sometimes towards the end of this quarter or early in the third quarter to start the development and construction work on that, so to have our own integrated facility for electrolyzer manufacturing. Then, the land for the solar and wind plants has been identified and site evaluation, site work, geotech and all of that is going on and we have been in a position to update over the next 6 to 9 months. So, in the ancillary and product system also, the work is underway and site evaluation versus green methanol, green ammonia, green fertilizers, everything is, in that sense, at full speed in that vertical. We will provide a comprehensive update with final year results and an update on the ingot wafer and other facilities on the integrated manufacturing in the half yearly results”.

With module manufacturing migrating to the TOPCON tech, the firm is confident that margins will sustain with a slight downward bias in the future.