86GW of renewables installed in India in 2019

Wind comprised 44% of the total renewables mix.

India’s renewable capacity installations reached 86GW in 2019, with wind and solar power dominating and taking 44% and 39% of the new power mix, according to JMK Research & Analytics.

India added about 2.4GW of new wind capacity, marking a 10% increase from CY2018. Gujarat led the installations with the commissioning of 1.4 GW of new wind projects followed by Tamil Nadu (650MW) and Maharashtra (212MW).

Most of the wind projects allocated in 2018 and scheduled to commission in 2019 got delayed and are now likely to be commissioned in 2020, JMK Research said. “This delay in wind projects is primarily attributed to various land availability issues and lack of grid transmission availability,” it added.

SembCorp, Mytrah, ReNew and Greenko were the leading players that added wind capacity in 2019.

Solar power also enjoyed growth as its share in the power mix rose by 5 ppt. About 7.5GW of new utility-scale solar capacity was added, which marks a 14% increase over the previous year. Another 1GW was added in rooftop solar installations.

Karnataka led the market with about 2GW of new solar capacity additions followed by Rajasthan (1.7GW), Tamil Nadu (1.5GW), Gujarat (936MW), Andhra Pradesh (917MW), and Madhya Pradesh (651 MW). NLC, ReNew, Azure, and Acme were the leading project developers to add maximum solar capacity in 2019.

However, according to JMK Research, the total solar capacity added fell short of its 2019 projections. “We estimated about 8.5 GW of new solar capacity based on the project allotment schedule under various state and central tenders in 2017-18. A lot of projects which got delayed are now likely to get commissioned in the first half of 2020. These delays are primarily due to land acquisition issues, execution delays, delay by DISCOMs (secondary power off-taker) in submitting approvals to SERCs for tariff adoption, policy uncertainty because of regressive net metering guidelines and withdrawal of open access benefits, retendering etc,” it said.