India's offshore wind case builds as Gujarat Lidar data delights

Offshore wind is making an ever-stronger case for a role in India’s fast-growing renewable energy sector, said a senior official with an EU-backed project helping pave the way for deployment in the country’s waters.

Early Lidar data has proved more promising than expected, and growing constraints on onshore wind and solar deployment makes the scale of offshore wind an attractive option for the Indian government as it chases massive renewables targets, said Gabriel Zeitouni, deputy head of the First Offshore Wind Project of India (FOWPI) project.

FOWPI, led by Danish consultancy COWI, has since 2015 worked to help transfer experience from the European sector to a potential first Indian deployment, covering key areas such as financial de-risking, environmental consenting, site investigation and turbine selection.

The project team has just analysed initial Lidar readings from the waters off the state of Gujarat that are due to host the first Indian turbines, comparing it against synthetic data used in initial studies.

That showed that wind speed was under-predicted, said Zeitouni. “Before, the long-term average was around seven metres/second in Gujarat. Now preliminary results based on six months of data suggest about eight m/s, which implies energy production expectation about 20% higher, which is very significant. That has been quite uplifting.”

“Given the overall renewable energy targets in India, and the limit of how much they can continue to grow onshore in solar and wind over the long term, it does make sense to add offshore wind,” said Zeitouni.

However, the key to success will be laying the basis for a predictable long-term pipeline that can persuade financial and supply chain investors to back a sector that is seen as far riskier than established offshore wind markets in Europe.

India will also need to chart a pathway to reduce power costs that will “likely start off, for the first project, at least three times more expensive than the mature onshore wind energy production they have today,” said Zeitouni. “But offshore wind costs are certainly expected to quickly decrease in India, as the pipeline and supply chain builds up in the country.”

Onshore wind in India has seen recent tender prices of around 2.77 rupees/kWh ($0.038/kWh).

“What we see is that people are quite cautious, but they are always attracted by the scale of India,” said Zeitouni.