India to stop setting annual targets for clean energy tenders: Official
Centre to assess state demand before issuing new renewable energy auctions
 "India to stop setting annual targets for clean energy tenders: Official")
India will stop setting annual targets for clean energy tenders after missing last year's goal and building up a large backlog of projects without buyers, a senior government official said.
Indian developers are already sitting on the rights to build around 43 gigawatts of renewable power for which they have yet to find customers. State utilities have delayed buying clean power, expecting prices to fall and citing uncertainty over power delivery due to delays in transmission infrastructure.
India's clean energy ministry has asked renewable implementation agencies to find buyers for the power from those tenders, Reuters reported in November.
"As per their (implementation agencies') initial evaluation, they are still confident that they will be able to sell quite a lot of power out of that (backlog)," Santosh Kumar Sarangi, a top official at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, told Reuters in an interview.
Sarangi said less than half of the unsold capacity may be cancelled.
Against this backdrop, the government plans to change how clean energy tenders are issued, moving away from fixed annual targets. Instead, new tenders will be floated only after assessing demand from state power utilities, Sarangi said.
India had initially planned to auction about 50 GW of new clean energy capacity last year but ended up tendering only around 15 GW, after auctioning about 50 GW each in 2023 and 2024.
Despite the slowdown, Sarangi said India remains on track to meet its target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel power capacity by 2030. The country added about 38 GW of clean energy capacity in 2025.
"We are not looking at a figure because we have pending bids that need to be finalised," Sarangi said, adding that agencies are engaging with state governments to assess demand.
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy may also consider changes to the structure of renewable energy implementation agencies, he said.
Power producers NTPC, NHPC and SJVN, which also act as federal renewable tendering agencies, could be relieved of that role, potentially leaving the Solar Energy Corp of India (SECI) as the main agency handling clean energy tenders.
The power producers have asked the government to relieve them from their role as implementation agencies and the government is evaluating the requests, the official said.
Among these agencies, NHPC has the largest volume of unsold tenders at about 15.8 GW, while SECI has the smallest at around 3.9 GW, according to a power ministry document reviewed by Reuters.
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