In an exclusive conversation with PV Tech, Abhinav Jindal, deputy general manager at India’s largest integrated power utility NTPC’s Power Management Institute (PMI), contextualises the scale of the transformation and India’s progress so far.
“India has been the largest growing economy in the world for some time and will continue to do so,” he says, adding that the country’s renewable additions have been “steadily increasing over the last 4-5 years” and remain firmly on track to meet the 500GW goal.
Grid transmission lag: panels ready, power stranded
For India, the push toward 500GW of non-fossil capacity is unfolding atop an energy system long shaped by coal. “Traditionally, our power systems have been coal dominated,” Jindal explains, noting that a coal plant typically needs four to five years to build – a time during which transmission, evacuation and distribution networks expand in parallel. Renewables, by contrast, disrupt this tempo. Solar and wind projects can be completed in just 12–15 months, far outpacing upgrades to the grid.
This mismatch is already playing out across several states. “Very often you will find the panels are in place, the modules are in place, the system is commissioned, but you can’t evacuate power, mainly because [the transmission network] has not been bolstered,” he says.
The other hurdles that emerge are legacy power purchase agreement (PPA) issues and low costs. “In some places, companies cannot take off the power that comes from renewables due to legacy PPA issues. Also, some bids have been priced at aggressively low levels, which makes it difficult for the states to honour those bids.”
Still, Jindal stresses the strength of India’s grid. “It has been over 10-12 years since we have seen a major blackout in India, which demonstrates that overall, we have a very healthy power system on all counts, not just evacuation.”
Furthermore, he adds, that under the One Nation, One Grid (ONOG) framework and coordinated planning by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), the grid is pretty much integrated. “We continue to maintain this robustness even as renewables penetrate the grid.”
According to Jindal, renewables come with inherent intermittency and weather-driven variability. While forecasting and planning can ease some of the unpredictability, their nature means the system will still require additional capacity to step in when fluctuations become significant.
Undersubscribed tenders and the need to reform
A parallel challenge unfolding in India’s clean-energy expansion is the growing incidence of undersubscribed tenders. Jindal attributes this to the increasing complexity of tender design. “Tenders have become increasingly innovative, and storage is emerging as a key element of power offtake,” he explains, with most now structured as firm and dispatchable renewable energy (FDRE), round-the-clock (RTC) or hybrid models.
But innovation has also exposed a structural flaw: unrealistically low baseline price estimates. “Some of the estimates made at a fundamental level are so low that we don’t find broad participation,” he says, noting that tariffs, in the race to bottom out, have crossed into unsustainable territory.
The government is reassessing the lowest bid (L1) benchmarks to avoid tender failures and restore market confidence. Yet even successfully auctioned bids face uncertainty when buyers back away from signed PPAs. “A risk mitigation mechanism needs to be built into the tendering strategy to assure developers that their capex is not at risk,” Jindal stresses.