We are eyeing tie ups around green hydrogen: Pinaki Bhattacharyya, CEO and founder – EQ Mag Pro
New Delhi: ETenergyWorld Spoke to Pinaki Bhattacharyya, founder, chief executive officer and managing director of Amp Energy India, a Delhi-based renewable energy developer, about the company’s future growth plans, green hydrogen and much more. Edited excerpts:
Tell us about your business outlook for the next five years and how much investment are you targeting for this?
We currently have a portfolio of over 1.5 gigawatt (GW) across 15 states in India and our plan is to scale up to 5 GW in the next five years. This will be balanced across utility and corporate customers. To develop 5 GW of renewable energy projects, we would need an investment of about 15,000 crore.
Do you have any business diversification plans? Any thoughts around green hydrogen?
Since we are operating in a very dynamic sector where things are rapidly changing and evolving, adapting to the changing environment helps us stay profitable and relevant. When we started, we were offering solar energy solutions to our customers with a plan to meet their end-to-end energy requirements. As of today, we are already providing solutions across technologies to our customers including solar, wind, wind solar hybrids, and battery energy storage systems meeting their short-term, medium-term and long-term requirements. We are also eyeing tie ups around green hydrogen as the government has provided a good incentive for using renewable energy for green hydrogen.
What are your capacity addition targets for the next financial year? How much investment are you targeting for this?
We plan to install 300 MW to 500 MW of projects every year and this would require about Rs 1,500 crore of investment.
Are you looking for funding rounds in the future? If yes, can you give us some details?
As a developer, we always need funds to fuel our expansion and since we are on a rapid growth path, we would continue to raise more capital to fund our development as required.
You are also the President of DISPA, which recently filed a petition in the Delhi High Court regarding MNRE’s ALMM amendment. Why did you decide to go to court?
The extension of ALMM to projects under open access and net metering was impacting over 4 GW of open access and rooftop projects under various stages of development, which will have a significant financial impact on developers and consumers. This will be an additional burden with basic customs duty which is applicable from 1 April, and GST adversely impacting solar projects. Developers are already facing issues such as supply chain disruption and supply shortage and such amendments tend to inflate the prices artificially. Moreover, the notification from MNRE had come just 2.5 months before the implementation date, which was too short a notice to prepare for the change. DISPA believes in advocacy and tried to speak with MNRE through various forums, personal meetings and also made representations but there was no positive response. With the deadline looming above us and to protect the ongoing projects, we had to take the only route that was available to us, therefore, we filed a writ petition in Delhi High Court.
Is there any update on it?
The Ministry on 28 March, 2022 extended the effective date by six months from April to October 2022. However, that only provides temporary relief and other issues that were raised still remain unaddressed such as the impact on the implementation of ongoing projects, manufacturers in the ALMM only producing low efficiency modules, etc. The high court in the last hearing has allowed to place on record the specific issues which require clarification from MNRE by way of an application and the writ petition will be kept pending in the meanwhile.
Why are you demanding a minimum one-year delay in implementation of the amendment? What are your other demands?
As suggested above, developers would like the ministry to keep the commercial and industrial projects under open access and net-metering outside the ambit of this order, because such projects are neither government funded nor subsidized. In addition, the present supply of solar modules is not enough to cater to government funded projects. Any shortage in supply will affect the development of solar energy projects. It is also a matter of concern that not all modules manufacturers pass reliability parameters and they do not make modules that can be used in commercial projects. We had requested for a one-year delay so that we are well prepared to subsume this change and a similar timeline that was provided to utility scale projects when ALMM was being introduced. After a year India will have sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of the Indian market.
Source: PTI
