India’s installed renewable energy capacity reached 172.37 GW by the end of the financial year 2024-25. The country witnessed its highest ever installations in a single year in the renewable energy sector, with 28.72 GW of capacity additions deployed between April 2024 to March 2025. With 23.83 GW of new deployments this year, the country’s solar power capacity crossed the 100 GW mark to reach 105.65 GW as of March 2025 – an impressive feat from just 3.99 GW as of March 2015.
Solar power is versatile and can be installed anywhere (rooftops, ground, water, and others) and also has affordability, policy support and incentives, ease of implementation as well as a bouquet of business offerings from the industry on its side. However, other segments, namely – wind, small hydro and bioenergy have not seen the same growth rate over the past decade as those witnessed in solar power owing to financing concerns, policy paralysis and other legacy issues. In fact, only 26.68 GW of wind power has been added in the past decade when compared to more than 100 GW of solar power installations. The capacity additions are even less in the case of biopower and small hydro over the past decade.
We feel that this situation will improve significantly going forward. While solar power will continue to be the fastest growing renewable energy source in the coming years, there will be an increase in pace of deployments of other sources as well, especially wind and bioenergy. Wind power uptake will be supported by the growing need for firm renewables by both corporate offtakers as well as utilities as well as the immense untapped opportunities in the offshore wind space. Meanwhile, bioenergy is receiving renewed interest especially in the compressed biogas, waste to energy and ethanol spaces.
With growing traction for battery and pumped storage, green hydrogen and its derivates and even carbon capture and storage, the next decade of growth in the Indian renewables sector is expected to be more diversified – with due importance to all possible energy sources from the government, energy offtakers as well as the industry.
