With 300 MW Win In REMCL RTC Tender, Ayana Energy Portfolio Set To Expand To 5 GW

Bengaluru headquartered Ayana Renewable Power is set to expand it’s portfolio size to over 5 GW with the allotment of 300 MW for itself in the REMCL (Railway Energy Management Company Limited) RTC tender. REMCL is a JV between the Railways and RITES.  Other winners in the crucial tender were NTPC with a 500 MW bid and O2 Power with a 60 MW allotment. The levelised tariff for the tender has been Rs 4.10, an improvement over the earliest RTC tender that was tried, where the winning tariff from ReNew power came in at Rs 2.90/kWh, with an annual escalation of 3% for the first 15 years of the 25 year PPA.

Project Nine Renewable Energy a fully owned subsidiary of Ayana Renewable Power won the capacity in reverse bid auction recently. The project will add approximately 1 GW of renewable capacity through solar and wind to Ayana’s portfolio and take it close to 5GW of cumulative capacity in operation, maintenance, and development.

For the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) backed Ayana Power, the project is a first-of-its-kind and for the Indian market as well, with a high degree of availability and dispatchability, and will add installed capacity of approximately 1 GW of renewables through solar, wind to Ayana’s portfolio with third party storage arrangements. Sources confirm that Ayana has outsourced storage to a third party, probably Greenko, which indicates use of pumped storage by the developer.  For the almost 1 GW of installations that will be required, Ayana is likely to use wind and solar in a 60:40 ratio, besides storage.

With an annual availability of over 85%, the project will provide firm renewable energy for 25 years and showcases the potential of RTC to enable baseload, rather than managing peak-load as has been traditionally done. Shivanand Nimbargi, MD & CEO of Ayana Renewable Power, commented, “RTC is the future of renewables, and we are proud to be first in the country to undertake the challenge of this tender which has stringent requirements on availability and dispatchability along with a 15min block settlement, making it a truly unique tender, and breaking new ground on reliable and firm renewable power. It also showcases the farsightedness of our government and policy makers who are ready to take up the challenge of RTC and a sign of a maturing industry and market that India now is, setting not only national but global benchmarks.”