India’s state-owned company the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) has issued a tender seeking up to 2.4GW of solar PV capacity across India.
NHPC issued a request for selection (RfS), which seeks to procure up to 1.2GW of solar PV capacity through a competitive bidding process, and additional capacity of up to 1.2GW with a “greenshoe option”.
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The developers of successful projects will enter into a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with the NHPC, which will then sell the electricity generated to state utilities, state distribution companies (Discoms) or any other beneficiaries.
In order to participate in the auction, projects will require to have a capacity of at least 50MW and up to 600MW. For projects located in Northeastern states and with extenuating circumstances, the minimum capacity requirement is lowered to 30MW.
Applications to enter the tender are open until 4 November 2024, with the solar projects to be set up on a build-own-operate (BOO) basis. Projects must connect to the Inter-State Transmission System (ISTS).
Solar PV and renewable energy tenders are increasingly more common in India. Between April 2023 and March 2024, nearly 70GW of renewable energy capacity was tendered, with 40GW ending up allotted. Solar PV represented nearly half of all the capacity tendered during that period. Another positive aspect for solar PV is that, in the past two years, solar tariffs have increased marginally by nearly 8.5% from an average of INR2.3-2.4/kWh (US$0.027-0.029/kWh) to INR2.5-2.6/kWh (US$0.030-0.031/kWh).
