Tuesday, June 24, 2014: Schneider Electric has said that the reason behind slower demand creation for components and equipment. They confirmed the news of policy and implementation issues at the State and Central levels. The company’s Bangalore plant has capacity to manufacture solar inverters producing 1.4 giga watt-a-year.
The demand of company’s inverters, other critical components and similar downstream equipment is very low after February, where new capacities of 750 MW in the first batch of phase II of National Solar Mission were auctioned. This has happened due dumping of solar modules related policy issues.
Plenty of large state initiated projects have also been stalled for slow implementation issues.
Anurag Garg, vice president of Solar Business at Schneider Electric India Pvt Ltd said, “Inspite of issuing LoIs, over 700 MW worth projects have been stalled for over a year due to absence of PPAs. All these projects are initiated by one of the southern states.” He also confirmed the news of pending implementation issues for some projects in few other states.
With the assumptions and vision of the growth potential, three years ago, Schneider introduced the technologies to create manufacturing plant for equipment such as solar inverters, boxed inverter substation, charge controllers which can sustain rough weather.
The company has products for telecom towers or village projects which are based rooftop and off grid. They’ve installed 200 MW worth solar inverters in Gujarat and Rajasthan since 2011. Garg also pointed at an issue of the solar sector standardization of grid unification, which needs to resolved in the country.
He also added that, Schneider Electric, which is leading in power transmission equipment has 31 units in India. These units have capability to extend in order to grow India’s share in solar sector.
