During a recent PV Insider webinar, Chandan Guha, CEO of Mahindra Solar One; provided an outlook on the PV utility scale market in India and identified financing, as the major challenge currently facing the project development industry.
“Financing will challenge technology at all times and will remain key” affirmed Chandan Guha, while explaining the main challenges of the PV industry in India during the recent webinar organized by PV Insider: ‘Spotlight on Indian PV’.
Guha provided a confident scope about the present and future of the PV industry in India, highlighting financing, technology and execution as the key drivers for the Indian solar industry.
Additionally, he revealed that some of the keys to develop a successful PV plant in India are: confidence to execute and manage complex projects, strong EPC contracts with performance clauses and strong O&M contracts with multi-year performance clauses will remain critical for the success of any PV project.
From the manufacturer standpoint, he stated that the assignment of relevant guarantees for the project and access to bankable technologies will continue to play an important role.
Among Guha’s final remarks, he encouraged the PV industry ‘not to press the reset button’ for India, but instead to look at the big picture and carry on embarking the PV journey. “It was never easy, it’s not easy now. The good news is that demand is constantly rising, there is a strong government commitment, awareness is increasing and the cost is coming down. We are quite there but not there yet”, he said; adding that the coming few months will decide how successful solar PV in India is going to be.
Mahindra Solar One is one of the fastest growing solar developers in India. The company was the very first one to achieve non-recourse financing ever and is currently planning to set up more than 100 MW of utility scale projects in the next couple of years. Among other projects, it has commissioned a 5 MW PV plant in the state of Rajasthan, which generates the highest output per MW of any solar plant in the country, using a cutting-edge tracker technology that maximizes the energy from the sun.
To view the full recording of the webinar ‘Spotlight on Indian PV’, where Chandan Guha, CEO of Mahindra Solar One; Amit Barve, General Manager Solar of SCHOTT Solar and Vineeth Vijayaraghavan, Editor of Panchabuta; compared the prospects for PV manufacturing and project development in India and discussed the industry’s feasibility and future outlook, please follow the link: http://www.pv-insider.com/development-india/content3.php
To find out more about ‘PV Project Development Summit India 2012’, please visit the conference website: www.pv-insider.com/development-india
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