India’s renewable energy expansion threatened by poor weather data, ET EnergyWorld

Industry leaders say India needs to modernise the way it monitors weather if its clean energy infrastructure is to realise its full potential.

“Our understanding of weather is not as good as it should be,” Amit Singh, chief executive officer of Adani Green Energy Ltd., said at the annual BloombergNEF summit in New Delhi on Thursday. Low density of weather stations and infrequent measurements have contributed to the poor performance of wind farms in India, he said.

The inability to accurately forecast weather makes it harder to optimize renewable energy production and can affect project safety and profitability, said Yogesh Patil, CEO of forecasting firm Skymet Weather Services. Among other things, it could strain the grid.

Existing weather models “are nowhere near what we need to do to do very good micro-locations” that pinpoint the optimal location for a wind turbine, according to Singh. “The industry needs to work together and develop a robust system for predicting dust movement and wind changes in the short and long term,” he said, adding that Adani Green has raised the issue with Indian authorities.

As it seeks to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy, India will need to increase the share of renewables in its coal-based energy mix, but it already faces constraints. Rapid economic growth is driving the fastest-growing electricity demand of any major economy. And with about 205 gigawatts of installed non-fossil power capacity, India is still a long way from the 500 gigawatts it aims to achieve by the end of the decade.

Scarcity of land and growing demand are the reasons why wind and solar power now have to be installed in hard-to-reach locations such as the sea or northern Ladakh, said Sumant Sinha, chairman of renewable energy firm ReNew Energy Global Plc.

Better understanding weather will become increasingly important as India enters a more difficult phase of renewable energy expansion, said Abhishek Raju, founder of geospatial data analytics firm SatSure.

“We need better weather modeling in remote areas where traditional weather models didn’t exist, and the government should take the lead in creating them” and making them available to investors in the renewables sector, he said.

Published on September 6, 2024 at 12:46 PM IST

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