Andhra Pradesh Government asks the state discoms to accept full power from the wind developers

Andhra Pradesh Government has asked the state DISCOMs to take all the power the wind developers produce and further pay for it, irrespective of the Capacity Utilization Factor (CUF) of the developer’s project. In one of the state’s order regarding the feed-in-tariff for wind energy, the CUF was discovered at 23.5% for an average wind project. Post this, the state DISCOMs interpreted it as a directive to accept only the quantity of power a wind plant would generate it is was 23.5% and reject any additional power supplied. If the plant, produced more power by adopting efficiencies that led to a higher CUF, the DISCOMs would reject it.
After this development, the MNRE Secretary had written to the Principal Secretary in Andhra Pradesh’s Energy Ministry in December 2017 that “the generic tariff determined by the Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission (APERC) may have taken 23.5% CUF as average CUF in the state for wind power projects and therefore, it is likely that there may be certain sites where CUF is more than the average CUF”. Recently Mr.Jain (MNRE) wrote to the Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission (APERC), as well as all state discoms, that “in the view of Secretary, MNRE’s letter, discoms have to treat wind power as must-run stations and take the entire power from them without curtailment.”
Due to the previous announcement from the APERC, the developers had assumed that about 2,000 MW of projects which had been turned down by the state’s discoms would have turned into Non-Performing Assets.
Despite the letter, some people in the industry feel that the bigger problem is of ‘backdown’ – discoms’ refusal to take wind power at times citing non-availability of grid capacity which has gone unaddressed and the MNREs letter won’t be of much help to the developers.