India to introduce a cap on solar tariff and reduces tender size for manufacturing unit

In a major development, the MNRE has directed the Solar Energy Corporation of India(SECI) to fix the upper permissible solar tariff at INR 2.50/kWh and INR 2.68/kWh for developers using domestic cells & modules (without safeguard duties) and imported products (with safeguard duties), respectively. SECI has reduced its solar manufacturing tender size from 5 GW to 3 GW and curtailed minimum bid capacity from 1 GW to 600 MW. However, the size of the PPA remains the same at 10 GW. This comes to post an announcement by the Power  Minister – that all the future renewable energy projects bid would have to cover at least a 50% of a project’s components with domestic manufacturing. Regarding the PPA, it must be executed within a maximum time frame of 90 days from the date of award and a minimum of 40% of commissioned within 21 months from the date of PPA signing. The remaining 60% of the capacity will have to be commissioned within 36 months from the date of the bid award letter. SECI has also revised the time allowed to set up manufacturing capacity to two years from the earlier three-year time period.

• For silicon-based facilities, the module manufacturing unit has to be set up in India whereas polysilicon can be imported.
• For non-silicon-based technologies, the primary functional raw material can be imported.

To support this development SECI has announced a 5 MW solar manufacturing tender linked to a 10 GW PPA, also in June. It was the first solar tender where developers were required to locally produce equipment in order to win projects.