Wind energy Enercon keen to set up 500 MW wind farm in Karnataka

Enercon is the world’s fourth largest wind turbine manufacturer. In India, however, the company has been facing some headwinds because the German company believes that its Indian partner has stolen its technology. The Germans went to the Indian courts, but lost.

“They have applied for 500 MW but we might allot about 200 MW,” Mr Kumar said. He said that it would be “a problem” if such large projects were allotted but the projects could not be commissioned.

“Suzlon, for instance, has currently occupied about 3,000 MW only 10 per cent of which has been commissioned,” he said. In this context, he added that an upper limit and a time limit would be placed on companies proposing to set up green power projects in the State.

Winners to be announced

Meanwhile, the winners of the tender for developing solar projects under the Karnataka Solar Mission are expected to be announced in a week.

“The technical bids will be announced in about five days,” Mr Prasanna Kumar said. He said that three of the companies which had bid for the tender have been involved in some enquiry by KREDL and that the final list would be announced once KREDL receives responses from them.

“We have given the companies three days to respond and we expect a response by the weekend,” he said, but declined to disclose what the enquiry was about.

Under the Karnataka Solar Mission, the State had announced that it was targeting 350 MW of solar projects by 2016.

As part of this, KREDL had floated a tender for setting up projects with a total capacity of 80 MW.

The development comes about three months the bids closed on November last year. Twenty two companies had applied for setting up projects. Though the bids closed on November 24, the bid documents weren’t opened immediately as the tendering process for the National Solar Mission was on and KREDL wanted to wait for those to close before the allocation of projects under the State solar policy was made.

Meanwhile, in December, the State Energy Department had placed stay on the tender process for developing the projects after few developers had filed a case stating that KREDL should have followed e-tendering procedure for the bidding process for companies to participate in the tender, and that the amount bidders had to pay as security/MW – Rs 20 lakh – was too high for small developers.

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