Accelerating the wind power capacity deployment is a crucial element of India’s energy transition story.
This report discusses the role of wind in India’s energy landscape in 2030 and beyond. It highlights key development in the wind sector and their implications for the sector’s growth. The report examines the complementarity of wind and solar in India, demonstrating how their diurnal and seasonal patterns can work together to create a more balanced and reliable renewable energy grid. It also addresses how overcoming current challenges in wind energy could unlock further potential for India’s energy transition. Additionally, this report provides data-driven insights on how increasing wind capacity can help reduce reliance on costlier energy storage solutions or thermal generation, ensuring non-fossil fuel electricity supply during non-solar hours.
Ramping up year-on-year wind installations by 22%, will not only help India meet NEP14 targets, but also help leverage its complementarity with solar to supply the demand during non-solar hours, potentially reducing the balancing needs through storage.
India’s power sector is witnessing a significant transformation, driven largely by the rapid expansion of solar power installations. Between 2014 and 2024, solar capacity grew multifold and is increasingly catering to daytime electricity demand. However, during non-solar hours, the supply of green electricity drops significantly and thermal resources continue to fill the gap.
While India is pushing for energy storage capacity deployments to address this issue, finding alternatives is critical to maintain the momentum of India’s energy transition. In this context, ramping up wind offers strategic advantages especially because of its diurnal, seasonal and spatial complementarity with solar power. In recent years, the impact of this complementarity is also being observed in the number of wind-solar hybrid tenders and the tariff discoveries.
In 2023, the share of wind and solar in India’s power grid on average was 19% during daytime whereas the share of thermal power stood at 71%. However, outside of solar hours, India continues to rely heavily on thermal power, meeting about 80% of total electricity demand on average. Wind contributed about 6% of demand during non-solar hours on an average.
By 2030, 21 out of 27 Indian states plan to contract more than 100 GW of wind. Even states with little or no wind potential, such as Odisha, Jharkhand, Punjab, and Bihar, are planning to include wind in their energy supply mix. This presents a unique opportunity for wind-rich states to export surplus generation to these states.
While solar capacity grew rapidly in recent years and is expected to accelerate further, meeting the electricity demand during non-solar hours with clean energy remains a challenge. If India had met its 2022 wind target of 60 GW, up to 14.5% of the non-solar hour demand could have been fulfilled through wind energy.
Wind energy plays a critical role in India’s energy transition. Ensuring round-the-clock availability of clean energy is essential for a smooth shift from a fossil-fuel-based economy to one driven by renewable energy. While efforts to deploy energy storage capacities are underway, diversifying the energy resource remains crucial for energy security, and wind energy is rightly placed to do so.
In addition to supporting the energy transition, the wind sector’s growth offers broader economic benefits, including creation of green jobs, both in capacity deployment and manufacturing and the opportunity to become an export hub for wind turbines and associated components, further boosting the country’s economic development.
Despite the recent growth in wind and solar installations, thermal power still caters to about 80% of India’s power needs in non-solar hours
India’s renewable energy (RE) sector is undergoing a significant transformation, particularly driven by solar power. Ever since the country has revised its RE target to 175 GW in 2015 and later updated it to 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity target at COP26, solar capacity installations surged by 180% from 3.8 GW in 2014 to 89.4 GW in August 2024, mainly due to falling costs, favourable policies and technological advancements. This rapid growth has positioned India as a key player in the global solar market. In the same period, however, India added only 7 GW of wind energy capacity. Although wind power had a head start, its growth slowed over the last decade due to land acquisition issues, transmission bottlenecks, and policy hurdles.
Since 2014, India’s non-fossil fuel generation capacity has steadily expanded. By August 2024, it reached 208 GW, accounting for 46% of India’s total installed capacity of 451 GW; of which, wind capacity stood at 47.2 GW (10.5% of total installed capacity) and solar capacity at 89.4 GW (20% of total installed capacity). As per the Central Electricity Authority’s (CEA) report on under-construction RE projects, as of June 2024, 83.6 GW of RE capacity is under-construction comprising 16.5 GW of wind, 54.3 GW of solar and 12.9 GW of hybrid RE projects.
In terms of electricity generation, wind and solar accounted for 4% and 6% of the overall mix in 2023. This share is expected to become 10% and 25% by March 2032, if India achieves its 14th National Electricity Plan (NEP14) targets.
NEP14 outlines capacity addition targets of 122 GW for wind and 364.6 GW for solar by March 2032, to accommodate rising electricity demand. To realise this target, wind and solar capacity has to grow at 22% and 24% y-o-y, respectively.
On examining India’s average daily generation profile, solar power meets up to 17% of demand during daytime (7:00 AM – 5:00 PM). This share increases to 19% when wind generation is included. However, the average share of wind and solar falls significantly during the non-solar hours; meeting only 6% of demand on average, leaving thermal power to cover around 80%.
Ramping up wind could now therefore be of more strategic importance than we realise as it can not only provide enhanced demand-supply balance but also help leverage the complementary nature of wind and solar helping the power sector planners to avoid locking-in resources into building more thermal capacity to meet the non-solar hour demand growth.
Wind and solar resources are intermittent by nature, meaning they cannot provide a reliable power supply on their own. However, utilising the complementary nature of these resources can significantly enhance their reliability. This is especially true in India where solar generation is witnessing an accelerated growth and will be increasingly catering the daytime electricity demand, while addressing non-solar hour demand with non-fossil fuel resources remains a challenge.
To resolve this issue, multiple alternatives coupled together are being explored and three most prominent clean options are: (a) expanding hydro power capacity, (b) deploying energy storage solutions (batteries and pumped hydro storage) and (c) increasing wind capacity. This chapter focuses on the complementarity of wind and solar resources and the impact of adding more wind to India’s overall capacity mix.
Complementarity refers to the ability of two energy resources to balance each other’s generation, providing a more stable and reliable power supply. Wind and solar demonstrate both temporal and spatial complementarity. In India, temporal complementarity is evident across seasons (seasonal complementarity) and throughout the day (diurnal complementarity).
Seasonal complementarity:
In India, wind and solar follow a seasonal complementarity. For example, the strong southwest monsoon wind causes an increase in wind generation during the monsoon season (June – September) whereas a decrease in solar generation is observed due to monsoon cloud cover, reflecting higher seasonal synergies.
Diurnal complementarity:
In India, wind power often peaks during the night and early morning, while solar power is at its highest during the day. Wind generation often increases during the late afternoon, evening and early morning hours when solar power is not available. By harnessing this complementarity, India can achieve a more reliable and stable RE supply throughout the day, reducing the need for thermal power during non-solar hours.
Data from 2023 suggests that wind’s share in the grid ranged from 3% (around 7:30 AM) to 7.2% (around 12:30 AM) and remained below 5% between 6 AM and 4 PM. Solar, on the other hand, gradually increased from sunrise, reaching 19% around noon before declining by sunset.
Had India met its 2022 wind targets, wind capacity by the end of 2022 would have reached around 60 GW and this would have pushed the share of wind in the grid to at least 6% during daytime (from close to 3% currently) and it could have gone up to 14.5% during non-solar hours, up from the current evening time high of around 6.3%. This would have helped reduce reliance on thermal power considerably (~7%-points) to meet non-solar hour demand.
Therefore, while solar capacity continues to expand, achieving the projected wind capacity addition of 122 GW by March 2032 (as defined in the NEP14) is critical.
Spatial complementary:
India’s wind resources also show spatial complementarity especially across western and southern regions. For instance, scarcity of wind resources in Rajasthan is complemented by its availability in Andhra Pradesh and vice versa across different months of the year. Similar trend could be observed in wind resource availability in Gujarat and Telangana.
Report – Redirecting wind energy in India 2024 – PDF (2 MB)
Ruchita Shah
Electricity Policy Analyst, India
Ember
