Draft National Wind Repowering Policy 2022 Finally Out

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has finally come out with its draft policy for Wind Repowering. The move is significant, and potentially a game changer for the sector considering the possible impact it can have on existing wind energy capacities. Wind energy capacity in India, as of August 2022, was at 41.4 GW.  The new draft calls for feedback from stakeholders by November 1, 2022.

Repowering has been a low lying fruit in many markets, especially European markets, where older wind turbines have been replaced with higher capacity, taller turbines to ensure higher power generation from the same site or area. In recent years, many European manufacturers, through their relevant government bodies, have also pushed for a repowering policy in India as the previous policy in 2016, the ‘Policy for Repowering of the Wind Power Projects’ on 5th August 2016′ failed to make any significant impact due to various reasons.

Targeted at Wind Turbine generators below 2 MW in size, the new policy acknowledges that both turbine capacities and height has increased  since the earliest wind turbines were installed in India, leaving a huge opportunity on the ground to generate more energy from these earliest, prime sites. As readers can see from the table below, from 1610 MW of total capacity in the sub 0.5 MW range, to over 8 GW in the sub 1 MW  range and beyond, the total capacity that potentially qualifies is over 25 GW. That places the possible capacity addition potential squarely in the range we have heard experts mention in the past year, ie, 20-25 GW.

The government has also cited the existence of a well functioning manufacturing ecosystem in the country for capacities of 3 MW and above to make the case for a fresh policy relook.

The new policy sets out to tackle some of the biggest issues with repowering in India, by proposing both a solution to the issue of pricing additional power (through a discovery mechanism, auction based we assume) , and in terms of compensating existing asset owners to cover the cost of replacement.

At SaurEnergy, we have regularly cited the missed opportunity in wind repowering, and the need to take urgent steps to ensure wind energy can contribute fairly to the country’s renewable targets. A repowering policy that works will go a long way towards redressing the balance between Wind and solar, which has been skewed completely in favour of solar in the past few years. Solar actually overtook wind energy capacity only in 2021, which indicates just how much of a lead wind ceded to solar in recent years.

Leading states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka, which have seen other states start to catch up with them in terms of renewable energy capacities in the last couple of years, might benefit hugely from the possible surge in wind energy capacity. Tamil Nadu in particular could potentially benefit handsomely from state support to the policy.

You can access the full draft of the policy here.