State-owned firm Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has launched a solar-plus-storage tender seeking 1.2GW of solar PV.
SECI issued a request for selection (RfS) last week (19 June) for the competitive solicitation process and aims to hybridise the solar PV generation with 600MW/3.6GWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS), ahead of connection to the Inter-State Transmission System (ISTS).
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Successful bidders will enter into a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with the agency for their build-own-operate (BOO) projects. Adding battery storage to the projects will enable power to be supplied during peak demand periods.
A pre-bid meeting for the tender takes place on 10 July 2025, and bidding will open on 21 August.
Solar-plus-storage and solar-wind hybrid tenders have been on the rise in India last year. Nearly half of the 73GW capacity tendered in 2024 is coming from hybrid tenders. Cumulatively, SECI has been the largest utility-scale renewable energy tendering agency with nearly 60GW of solar PV auctioned as of the end of 2024. At the beginning of the year, SECI awarded 2GW of solar-plus-storage in a reverse auction where five projects were awarded capacity.
Tenders from SECI and other national and regional government agencies have been credited with driving forward procurement in India’s nascent energy storage sector.
According to a Central Electricity Authority briefing from a recent workshop, SECI highlighted that its Solar+BESS tender tariffs declined from INR6.99/unit (US$0.081/unit) in August 2018 to INR3.09/unit by September last year.
This article was first published on our sister site Energy-Storage.news, which also covers the latest regulation news for safety and electricity supply to battery storage installations.
