Tuesday, September 02, 2014: The solar segment’s engineering, procurement and construction business is being eyed by Suzlon Energy. The company has plans regarding the same, which were chalked out six years ago, to be shelved in a later stage.
Suzlon’s Chairman and Managing Director Tulsi Tanti said at India Economic Summit in New Delhi in November 2008 that the company was interested in building solar plants for others. Presently the company deals with windmills. In the past six years lot of things have changed. The cost of putting up solar photovoltaic plants dropped steeply. Suzlon’s fortunes dropped too after its acquisition of German company REPower for $1 billion. Soon after this acquisition the global economy collapsed.
Now the company is getting back to shape as they underwent a major restructuring process. Now the company is selling chunks of its business to the European subsidiary Senvion and also paying off debts. Therefore now their solar plans can be revived too. The company had enough land-plus-transmission infrastructure to support creation of 80-100MW solar PV capacity. More land will be mobilised for 30MW extra as the company has signed agreements too.
Suzlon aims to build solar power plants and sell parcels of them to the investors. To create 1MW solar PV capacity it costs Rs 70 million these days. As a global emphasis has been created on green power several renewable energy companies are emerging. These companies like to have all kind of renewable power projects in their portfolio, mainly wind and solar. Suzlon doesn’t want to miss this opportunity any more.