India

The State Agency for Alternative & Renewable Energy is preparing a draft state strategy to be completed in about six months.

The Joint Secretary of India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy believes that solar power will attain grid parity by 2017. Sec. Tapun Kapoor based his assessment on the response from the Solar Manufacturing Industry to levelize cost that is equal to or less than the price of purchasing power from the grid. Kapoor said this while presenting the Solar Power Scenario in India during the recently concluded 27th Meeting of Forum of Regulators. Reaching grid parity is an important point in the development of new sources of power, such as solar power, as it is the point at which it becomes a contender for widespread development without subsidy support.

The Orissa Electricity Regulatory Commission announced that 30,000 MW solar thermal power projects could be set up in 10% of wasteland in the state were to be made available for solar power installation.

Nepal will import additional 150MW from the Indian electricity market despite the latter's power deficit.

The Adani Group has commissioned what is being touted as India’s largest solar power plant after a build process that took only five months.

 Azure Power has commissioned its third solar plant, located in Rajasthan, in just under two years.

The increasing number of bioenergy power generation projects in 2011 produced 500MW of energy.

Power crisis in Andhra Pradesh is expected to worsen with an average power shortfall of 1,180 million units from January-May 2012.

Power plants to be installed in Bangladesh by 2015 may not get adequate gas supply.

ABB has booked an order worth more than Rs. 4000 crores from Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd., to deliver UHVDC transmission system.

NTPC has signed a PPA with Madhya Pradesh Power Trading Company for supplying electricity from a 50MW solar plant, based in Rajgarh. It is expected to be commissioned by 2013.

India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission is bound to achieve 20 GW until 2022. India has some KW of installed solar power until the kick start of the Mission in 2010. India is one of the two countries in the world with more than one billion and is also home to many persons without electricity. But we are not talking about off-grid applications, we are talking about on-grid and with Fit. India learnt the lesson of Fit and RPS driven PPA and created their own scheme: RPO – Renewable Purchase Obligation – with a reverse bidding to determine the Fit.

Reliance Power is in talks with Shell to jointly set up a LNG terminal to secure supplies for its gas-fired power plant.

Tata Power Ltd, India’s largest integrated power utility, has confirmed its buy out of the 51% stake owned by BP Alternative Energy Holding in their joint company, Tata BP Solar.

From the commissioning schedule of ultra mega power projects (UMPPs) provided by the power ministry, it seems that the the projects are well on track with respect to their completion timelines. For instance, CEA has revised the timelines for all five units of the 4,000 MW Mundra UMPP so that the projects may achieve commissioning much earlier than was originally envisaged in the PPA schedule. For the 800 MW unit 1, CEA has pushed the commissioning date forward by nearly five months to February, 2012 as against the scheduled commissioning date of August, 2012. The CEA has similarly revised the commissioning dates for the remaining four units. The new dates for the four units are now May, 2012 (unit-II), September, 2012 (unit-III), November, 2012 (unit-IV), and February, 2013 (unit-V) as against the original schedule where the the units were expected to go on steam form February, 2013, August, 2013, February, 2014 and August, 2013 respectively. The Mundra UMPP has been set up by Coastal Gujarat Power Limited (CGPL), a wholly owned subsidiary of TPIL, which was incorporated as a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to implement the project. The five units of 800 MW each generate a total of 4000 MW power using supercritical technology.

Lok Sabha MP Vundavali Aruna Kumar has requested allocation of 0.20 mmscmd of gas on a priority basis for APGPCL's 270 MW power plant situated in Vijjeswaram.