India’s First Tender for Sea-Bed Leasing for Offshore Wind Projects by Month End

India’s first tender for sea-bed leasing for offshore wind projects will be out “very soon”, perhaps by the end of this month (March), according to Rakesh Katyal, Director, National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE), the government body that will issue the tender.

This is the first step, a milestone, but the first unit of electricity from an offshore wind power plant in India will take a good seven years.

The tender will be for four blocks of sea-bed in the Gulf of Mannar, off the coast of southern Tamil Nadu, each of which can accommodate 1 GW of wind power plants. Bidders will be given marks for their technical capabilities (70 per cent) and the lease rent they offer for the sea-bed (30 per cent); the highest four bidders will get a consent letter from NIWE for conducting survey. Then, with the consent letter, they go to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), to sign the ‘Agreement to Lease’, then ‘Survey Lease Deed Agreement’ and then the ‘Construction and Operation Lease Deed Agreement’. Once these agreements are in place, the winning bidders come back to NIWE to get the ‘Concessionaire Agreement’.

This process is expected to take about three years and then the bidders get four years to construct the projects.