India is planning to bid out 500 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy generation capacity by 2028 to achieve its goal of 40 percent electricity generation from non-fossil fuels by 2030, said Anand Kumar, secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), today at the India-Norway Business Summit 2019 in New Delhi.
Of this, 350 GW would come from solar, 140 GW from wind, and the remaining from small hydro, biomass, he added.
“This figure excludes large hydro. If we take large hydro into account the figure will grow to 560 GW to 575 GW. To reach this figure we have to bid out 30 GW of solar energy and 10 GW of wind energy every year,” Kumar said.
He further added that if the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grows at a rate of 6.5 percent, the requirement for electricity generation capacity would reach 840 GW by 2030.
“Out of 840 GW, we plan to install a little more than 500 GW in renewables. We have installed 75 GW renewable energy capacity in the country and another 46 GW is under various stages of installations,” added Kumar.
He also said that if large hydro projects were considered under renewable energy, an additional 46 GW would be in the process of installation, taking the total figure to 163 GW.
The existing 75 Gw base of green energy capacity constitutes around 22 percent of the total installed power generation capacity.
Kumar said that the share of non-fossil fuel based capacity in total would be 33 percent by 2022 without considering large hydro plants. The country would achieve 40 percent by 2022 itself rather than 2030 in case large hydro is also taken into account.
