Winning bids as low as INR3.41/kWh (US$0.041/kWh) have been registered in a tender for solar PV paired with battery storage hosted by the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI).
While results are still to be published, according to the state-run solar corporation’s e-tender portal there were four winning companies (see above): Pace Digitek Infra, awarded 100MW at INR3.41/kWh—which was the lowest bid—Hero Solar Energy, awarded 250MW at INR3.42/kWh, ACME Solar Holdings (350MW, also at INR3.42/kWh) and JSW Neo Energy, which won the most capacity at 500MW, again with a bid of INR3.42/kWh.
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Bidding closed yesterday (16 July) in SECI’s tender for 1,200MW of solar PV and 600MW/1,200MWh battery energy storage systems (BESS) to be deployed at locations across India and connected to the Inter State Transmission System (ISTS).
The reverse auction was launched with a Notice Inviting Tender (NIT) issued by SECI on 15 March for the Request for Selection (RFS). Buying entities for the solar-generated power will set 2-hour periods each day during which energy will be drawn from the energy storage system (ESS), determined on a day-ahead basis.
Projects will be set up on a build-own-and-operate (BOO) basis, with SECI entering into 25-year power purchase agreements (PPAs) with winning bidders. The SECI competitive solicitation for the aggregate 1,200MW solar PV capacity and BESS capacity was run under Ministry of Power guidelines for tariff-based competitive bidding.
NTPC Renewable Energy and ReNew Solar Power, two of India’s biggest players thus far in solar PV and energy storage tenders, lost out with bids that couldn’t match the winners: NTPC Renewable Energy only just, at IR3.43/kWh, and Renew Solar Power further out at IR3.71/kWh.
Debmalya Sen, energy storage expert and India lead at the World Economic Forum (WEF), commented on business networking site LinkedIn that the SECI tender’s price discovery demonstrates how competitive solar PV and BESS now are.
Winning bids were almost a Rupee lower than recent peak power tenders, and even beat some of the recent hybrid solar-wind renewable energy tenders, making it a “very encouraging set of results,” Sen wrote.
This meant solar-plus-storage could likely come in cheaper than new coal-fired facilities and be much faster to develop and build, he wrote.
Further info on the solar-plus-storage tender, ‘RfS for Setting up of 1200 MW ISTS-connected Solar PV Power Projects with 600 MW/1200 MWh Energy Storage Systems (ESS) in India under Tariff-based Competitive Bidding (SECI-ISTS-XV)’ can be found on SECI’s website.
In fiscal year 2024, India has more than trebled utility-scale renewables tender capacity to 69.8GW, 48% of which from solar PV. Out of the nearly 70GW of capacity tendered from 1 April 2023 until 31 March 2024, 40GW ended up being awarded, up from only 10GW of capacity ended up allotted in FY23, according to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) and JMK Research & Analytics.
A quarter of the nearly 70GW of renewable capacity tendered came from Indian utility Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), highlighting the importance of state-level tendering authorities’ role in the deployment of utility-scale renewables.
Read the full version of this story on our sister site, Energy-Storage.news.
Additional reporting for PV Tech by Simon Yuen.
