Wind Power - Why will it make a strong comeback in India

I want to open with a scene I've sat through, in one form or another, at more Maharashtra and Gujarat tariff hearings than I can count. A DISCOM's power-purchase planner puts up the state's daily load curve. Sometime around noon the line sags — cheap solar is flooding the grid, prices on the exchange are scraping the floor.

Then, a little after five in the evening, the same line snaps upward like a slingshot, and everyone in the room quietly does the same arithmetic: where is that next block of megawatts coming from, and what is it going to cost us tonight?

That gap — between too much clean power at noon and not enough of it at eight in the evening — is, in my view, the defining engineering and financial problem of India's power sector for the rest of this decade. And it is also, not coincidentally, the reason I think wind energy is about to have a second act that looks nothing like its first.

This isn't a nostalgia piece for the industry that gave India the Suzlon growth story of the 2000s. It's an argument, built from the data, that wind's oldest "flaw" — it refuses to keep solar's tidy nine-to-five — has quietly become its most valuable feature.

Portfolio managers have a word for an asset that zigs when everything else zags: they call it a diversifier, and they pay a premium for it. India's power planners are only now starting to price wind the same way.

Cumulative installed capacity, India, wind (2005–2025) vs. solar (2010–2025). Compiled on an MNRE/CEA installed-capacity basis; 2026 wind marker from MNRE's 30 Jun 2026 Lok Sabha reply.

HOW WIND GOT HERE, AND WHY IT STALLED

A Quarter-Century in Two Speeds

Wind was India's original renewable success story, and it's worth remembering how early it started. The first demonstration wind farms went up in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu in the late 1980s under a Danish aid programme; by the mid-1990s Tamil Nadu alone was adding close to 300 MW a year, driven by a combination that will feel very familiar to anyone who has watched capital-intensive Indian industries grow: 100% accelerated depreciation, a five-year tax holiday, and a state government willing to exempt wind investment from sales tax.

Textile mills — heavy power users looking for a tax shield as much as a power source — became some of India's first wind IPPs.

Tulsi Tanti built Suzlon into a top-ten global turbine maker on the back of exactly this wave, and by the early 2000s India's installed base had already crossed 1 GW.

The growth compounded through the 2000s and early 2010s: roughly 13 GW by 2010, 21 GW by 2014, a peak addition year in FY2016-17 that pushed cumulative capacity past 32 GW. Then, in 2017, the government switched wind procurement from feed-in tariffs to competitive reverse auctions — a sensible move to discover true market prices, but one that landed on developers all at once, mid-cycle, the way a change in accounting rules lands on an industry that has spent a decade planning around the old ones. Growth didn't collapse, but it downshifted hard.

Between 2014 and 2024, solar capacity grew more than twenty-fold. Wind, in the same window, added barely 7 GW net.

FIELD NOTE

I've watched this exact movie before in other Indian capital-goods industries — sugar mills built out on cane-price subsidies, textile units expanded on cheap institutional credit — where a generation of assets gets built to fit one set of rules, and then has to relearn its economics when the rules change under it.

Wind's 2017–2022 slowdown wasn't a resource problem or a technology problem. It was a business-model problem. What's changed since isn't the wind — it's that the rules have finally started catching up to what the wind was doing all along.

That catch-up is now visible in the installation numbers. FY2025-26 was wind's best year on record: roughly 6.05 GW added, a 46% jump over the year before, taking cumulative capacity past 57 GW by June 2026 and pushing India to fourth place globally in installed wind capacity. Something structural is pulling wind back into favour — and it isn't sentiment. It's price signals.

WHY “RE100” IS HARDER THAN IT SOUNDS IN AN INDIAN GRID

The Problem Solar Alone Cannot Solve

Every large Indian corporate I advise on power procurement eventually asks a version of the same question: can we actually get to 100% renewable, round the clock, on the Indian grid, today? 

The honest answer is: not with solar alone, and not even close. RE100 — the global coalition of corporates committed to sourcing 100% renewable power — reports that its member companies operating in India source roughly 39% of their electricity from renewables, against a global RE100 average closer to 53%. The gap isn't ambition. It's physics: solar generates for roughly eight to nine hours a day, and an Indian factory, data centre or hospital doesn't switch off for the other fifteen.

The scale of the resulting grid stress has become impossible to wave away. A 2026 working paper from the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister mapped India's “net load” — total demand minus solar output — at 15-minute resolution across recent summers and winters, and the picture is stark. In summer, the grid now traces a textbook “duck curve”: a deep midday belly as solar floods in, followed by a vertical evening climb as the sun drops and air-conditioners stay on.

In winter, it's worse in a different way — a “camel curve” with two humps, morning and evening, on either side of a solar-driven midday dip. Either way, the same fact holds: the ramp conventional generation must supply within a few hours, every single evening, has more than doubled since 2023.

Evening net-load ramp — extra conventional/storage capacity the grid must supply within a few hours as solar output falls each evening — summer (May) vs. winter (January), 2023–2026. Source: EAC-PM working paper on grid flexibility (2026), as reported in Indian business press, Jul 2026.

The paper's most uncomfortable finding, to my mind, is about where India's power shortages actually happen. Across April and May 2026, the grid failed to meet demand during evening and night hours on 36 of 61 days — against just six days of shortfall during solar hours. On the exchange, the same story shows up in prices: power in the middle of a sunny day has cleared as low as ₹1.11 a unit on the Indian Energy Exchange, while evening prices repeatedly slam into the ₹10 regulatory ceiling. India isn't short of electricity at noon. It is increasingly short of it after dark, and the shortfall is getting worse every year solar additions outpace everything else.

India isn't short of electricity at noon. It is increasingly short of it after dark — and the gap is widening every year solar keeps winning the capacity race alone.

The obvious fix is storage, and India is building it — but not nearly fast enough yet. The same EAC-PM analysis estimates that flattening even half of a typical summer evening ramp would require roughly 130 GWh of battery and pumped-storage discharge; India's combined fleet was managing under 24 GWh a day as of mid-2026. Storage will close a real part of this gap over the next five years. But storage bought at scale is expensive, and every gigawatt-hour of evening demand that a well-sited wind farm can serve directly is a gigawatt-hour a DISCOM doesn't have to pay a battery — or an imported-coal peaker — to cover instead.

THREE WAYS WIND AND SOLAR COVER FOR EACH OTHER

The Complementarity Case

This is where wind's old “unreliability” reframes itself as a genuine system asset, and it does so in three separate, additive ways — through the day, through the year, and across the map.

Diurnal: wind works the night shift

Ember's 2024 analysis of India's disaggregated wind and solar generation found that wind's share of the grid ranges from around 3% near 7:30 in the morning to roughly 7.2% around half past midnight — staying below 5% through most of the solar day and rising precisely as solar falls away. Had India actually hit its 2022 wind target of 60 GW (it reached roughly 40 GW that year), Ember estimates wind's share of non-solar-hour demand could have reached 14.5%, up from an actual figure closer to 6% — enough to meaningfully dent the roughly 80% of non-solar-hour demand that thermal power still has to cover today.

The generation-profile data behind this piece — modelled diurnal yield across Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu — tells the same story at the individual-asset level, and I'll come back to it in detail in the next section, because it's the single most useful chart I've built for client conversations this year.

Seasonal: the monsoon swap

Average daily wind yield by month, Gujarat / Tamil Nadu / Maharashtra — illustrative modelled generation profile accompanying this analysis, shown against the June–September southwest monsoon window.

Across all three states in the accompanying dataset, wind yield roughly triples between the driest winter months and the June–September southwest monsoon — precisely the four months when heavy cloud cover suppresses solar irradiance across most of peninsular and western India. Ember's independent seasonal analysis reaches the same conclusion from satellite and reanalysis data: strong monsoon winds push wind generation up just as cloud cover pushes solar generation down. A portfolio holding both isn't just diversified in theory — the two assets are, almost by design, taking turns.

Spatial: the map fills in its own gaps

The same complementarity shows up geographically. Ember's analysis notes that a lean month for wind in Rajasthan tends to be a strong one in Andhra Pradesh, and vice versa; Gujarat and Telangana show a similar offsetting pattern across the year. A national portfolio spread across wind-rich states smooths out what any single state's wind fleet, viewed alone, would show as troubling variability.

FIELD NOTE

I think about this the way a cricket team thinks about its bowling attack. An attack of only fast bowlers looks devastating on a green, seaming morning pitch — and then gets carted around the park once the pitch flattens out under lights and the ball stops swinging. Nobody who follows the sport needs this explained; you carry pace and spin because conditions change through the day and across the season, and the two skill sets cover for each other's bad days. Grid planners are only now internalising the same logic about generation assets that Indian cricket captains have understood for decades.

6% → 14.5% Wind's estimated share of non-solar-hour demand today, vs. what it could have been had 2022 wind targets been met (Ember)

~3× Increase in average wind yield from winter trough to monsoon peak, across MH/Gujarat/TN generation profiles

80% Share of India's non-solar-hour demand still met by thermal power, per Ember's 2023 baseline analysis

THE PRICE SIGNAL THAT QUIETLY REWARDS WIND

Reading Maharashtra's ToD Order Like a Trader

If you want to see the complementarity argument turned into an actual price signal, you don't need a satellite dataset — you need MERC's tariff order. Maharashtra's revised Time-of-Day structure, effective from April 2025 and running through FY2029-30, carves the day into four slabs. I find it easier, in client workshops, to just label them A through D:

A 00:00–06:00 NIGHT · −10%

B 06:00–09:00 MORNING · flat

C 09:00–17:00 SOLAR HOURS · −15 to −25%

D 17:00–24:00 PEAK · +25%

Zone C — Solar Hours — is where MERC wants the state's consumption to migrate, and it is leaning hard on the tariff to make that happen: a rebate that starts at 15% (April–September) to 25% (October–March) in FY2025-26 and steps up, by design, to as much as 30% by FY2029-30. Zone D, the evening Peak block, carries a mirror-image surcharge — 20% generally, 25% for LT and HT Industrial & Commercial consumers, the segment that actually signs open-access wind PPAs. Banking of surplus solar energy is now barred from being drawn down during Zone D altogether, precisely to stop rooftop and open-access solar from quietly re-exporting itself into the priciest hour of the day.

Here is the point I keep coming back to with clients: wind does comparatively little of its work in Zone C. 

Across the modelled generation profiles for Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu behind this analysis, wind delivers only about a fifth of its annual output during MERC's Solar Hours — the one block the tariff order is actively trying to discount away. The other four-fifths lands in Zones A, B and D: the “other zones” a solar-saturated portfolio most needs help covering, and, in Zone D's case, the single most expensive block on the entire tariff schedule.

Top: average share of a wind farm's annual generation falling in each of MERC's four ToD blocks (mean of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu; dots show state-level range). Bottom: the MERC ToD charge/rebate applying to that same block, FY2025-26, LT/HT Industrial & Commercial category. Source: MSEDCL MYT Order press note (MERC, effective 1 Apr 2025).

WHY THIS MATTERS COMMERCIALLY

A C&I consumer buying wind through open access isn't just buying clean electrons. Roughly a third of that electricity, on the data here, arrives during Zone D — precisely the six-to-seven hours when grid power costs the most and banked solar can't be drawn at all. That's not a coincidence a procurement team should ignore; it's the difference between a PPA that merely offsets carbon and one that offsets your single costliest hour of the day.

I've had more than one CFO ask me, half-joking, whether MERC is trying to tell Maharashtra's industry something. It is — and the message isn't really about wind specifically. It's that the era of a flat, time-blind tariff is ending everywhere solar penetration gets high enough, and every state regulator from Gujarat to Karnataka is moving through some version of the same redesign. Wind just happens to be the generation asset that was, without any planning on its part, already sitting in the right zones when the price signal arrived.

SIX STATES, ONE NATIONAL RULEBOOK, SIX DIFFERENT TARIFFS

Maharashtra Isn't Alone: The State ToD Patchwork

Maharashtra's order isn't a one-off — it's Maharashtra's particular reading of a national floor. The Ministry of Power's Electricity (Rights of Consumers) Amendment Rules, 2023 set a mandatory baseline every state regulator in the country has to work within: peak-hour ToD tariff for C&I consumers above 10 kW demand at least 1.20 times normal (1.10 times for everyone else), a solar-hour tariff at least 20% below normal, solar hours fixed at an eight-hour block, and peak hours capped at no longer than that same eight-hour window. C&I consumers were meant to be on ToD by April 2024; everyone else, barring agriculture, by April 2025.

The rollout since then has been governed less by ambition than by hardware. As of March 2025, Ember estimates only about 10.8% of India's sanctioned smart meters — the devices that actually record which hour a unit was drawn in — had been installed nationally. Without one, a ToD tariff is a line in a gazette notification, not a line on a bill. That gap is most of the explanation for why some states moved immediately and others are still working through it years after the rule came into force.

State ToD orders vs. the Ministry of Power's 2023 floor: peak-hour surcharge and off-peak/solar-hour rebate, by state, most recent tariff orders. Sources: state tariff orders (MERC, RERC, TNERC); Ember, ‘Powering India’s Solar Future Through Household Demand Flexibility’ (Apr 2025); Electricity (Rights of Consumers) Amendment Rules, 2023.

Rajasthan and Maharashtra have pushed furthest past the floor, both running close to symmetric bands — a 25% rebate against a 25–30% surcharge — which RERC has explicitly defended as necessary to manage the state's own power deficit. Rajasthan even calibrates the length of its peak window by season (seven hours in winter, five in summer) so it never exceeds the solar-hour block, exactly as the national rule requires.

Tamil Nadu carries the same 25% peak surcharge, but its structure diverges in a way I think is genuinely significant for wind. TNERC splits its peak window into two blocks — 6am to 10am and 6pm to 10pm — rather than one long evening slab, and its only discount, a modest 5% rebate, applies overnight (10pm to 5am), not to a dedicated solar-hour window at all. Tamil Nadu, India's second-largest wind state and the state where this entire industry began, has not yet built the solar-hour discount the 2023 Rules technically required of C&I consumers from April 2024. There's a wind-specific wrinkle here too: TN's morning peak block lands exactly where the accompanying generation data shows wind at its weakest — the 06:00–09:00 window carries only about 14–15% of a Tamil Nadu turbine's annual output. The evening block still plays to wind's strength; the morning one is a genuine gap.

Bihar and Madhya Pradesh sit at the Rules' bare minimum — a 20% solar-hour rebate against a 10% peak surcharge — unsurprising given neither carries much wind resource or renewables-driven grid stress today; Madhya Pradesh is the only one of the six to additionally recognise a distinct morning peak.

Gujarat has taken a structurally different approach: rather than a percentage adjustment, GERC offers a flat rebate — ₹0.60 per unit — for consumption inside a solar window just extended from four hours (11am–3pm) to six (11am–5pm) for FY2026-27, with no symmetric peak surcharge built into that particular scheme. It's a gentler nudge than Maharashtra's, consistent with a state whose distribution companies are financially healthier and feel less pressure to browbeat consumers into shifting load.

And then there's Karnataka, worth dwelling on because the irony is hard to miss: it added more new wind capacity than anywhere except Gujarat in FY2025-26, and its own regulator has deferred solar-hour ToD altogether, citing the plain fact that Karnataka doesn't yet have surplus solar to shift demand toward. A state building wind at a record pace currently has no tariff mechanism at all rewarding the hours that wind, rather than solar, is filling.

FIELD NOTE

This has the shape of India's GST rollout to me — one national floor, set on a single date, followed by years of uneven state-by-state capability catching up to the law. GST went live at a single midnight session in July 2017; it took the better part of three years before e-way bills, input-credit matching and state-level enforcement converged into something resembling a uniform system nationally. ToD tariffs are tracing an almost identical arc: a central mandate, a smart-meter bottleneck nobody fully priced in, and roughly thirty states moving at roughly thirty different speeds.

REPOWERING, RPO, TRANSMISSION ACCESS, AND A GENUINELY STRUCTURAL TRANSMISSION REFORM

The Policy Machinery Is Finally Catching Up

Price signals only work if the surrounding policy plumbing lets a developer actually build, connect and get paid. On that front, the last three years have produced more substantive wind-specific policy than the preceding decade.

A dedicated wind purchase obligation

In 2022, the Ministry of Power carved out a wind-specific sub-trajectory inside the broader Renewable Purchase Obligation — starting at 0.67% of a distribution utility's purchases and climbing to 3.48% by 2030 — formalised under the Energy Conservation Act with monetary penalties for non-compliance from October 2023. By 2026, MNRE had built on this with a distinct Wind Renewable Consumption Obligation layered onto the RPO framework, forcing designated large consumers — not just DISCOMs — to source a specific slice of wind power rather than letting cheaper solar quietly satisfy the entire renewable requirement, as had been happening in practice.

Compliance is still patchy — only a handful of states hit their RPO trajectory in each of the last two years it was tracked — but the direction of travel, from a single blended renewable target to source-specific carve-outs, is unambiguous.

Repowering: mining the best sites twice

Some of India's best wind sites — coastal Tamil Nadu and Gujarat especially — are occupied by 1990s-vintage turbines rated at 250 kW to 500 kW, sited on some of the best wind resource in the country but running at a fraction of what a modern machine would produce there. A modern 4+ MW turbine, on a considerably taller tower with a much larger rotor swept area, can roughly double the energy yield from the same footprint. MNRE's National Repowering and Life Extension Policy, 2023, formalised eligibility and incentives for exactly this trade, estimating a national repowering opportunity of around 25 GW from turbines under 2 MW alone; Tamil Nadu became the first state, in 2024, to legislate its own dedicated repowering and life-extension policy, with relaxed micrositing norms built specifically for replacement projects.

Transmission access: the quiet structural win

The policy development I'd flag as most consequential for wind specifically — and the one I think gets the least attention outside regulatory circles — is CERC's Third Amendment to the Connectivity and General Network Access Regulations, notified in 2025. For the first time, India's transmission access rules formally distinguish between “solar hour access” and “non-solar hour access”: the National Load Despatch Centre now declares solar hours weekly for each state, solar plants get priority injection rights during that window, and wind and storage projects get a defined, protected right to inject during the remaining non-solar hours on the same shared transmission corridor. It's a genuinely elegant piece of market design — effectively time-sharing scarce transmission capacity between two resources that barely compete for the same hours in the first place — and it removes a real bottleneck that had, until now, forced wind and solar developers into a zero-sum fight for the same interconnection queue.

Hybrid tenders are already pricing the complementarity

You can see the economic value of wind-solar complementarity showing up directly in auction results. Recent SECI ISTS-connected tenders have discovered ₹2.48/unit for vanilla solar (minimum CUF 17%), ₹3.60–3.70/unit for vanilla wind (minimum CUF 22%) — and ₹3.43–3.46/unit for wind-solar hybrid projects carrying a much higher minimum CUF requirement of 30%. Hybrid isn't just splitting the difference on price; it's delivering meaningfully more reliable output per rupee than either technology alone, which is exactly what you'd expect once you've seen how little the two generation profiles overlap.

Latest SECI ISTS-connected tender results: discovered tariff and minimum CUF requirement, vanilla solar vs. wind-solar hybrid vs. vanilla wind. Source: SECI tender results compiled in Ember, ‘Redirecting wind energy in India’.

The transmission-charge waiver, phasing out on schedule

The 100% waiver on Inter-State Transmission System charges that fuelled a rush of wind and solar commissioning through mid-2025 ended, as scheduled, on 30 June 2025. Projects commissioning from July 2025 now face a graded charge starting at 25% and rising to 100% by June 2028 — a deliberate, telegraphed removal of a subsidy rather than a policy shock, which I'd count as a sign of a maturing market rather than a headwind. Offshore wind and green-hydrogen-linked projects, notably, keep their full waiver through 2032, a full 25 years from commissioning — a clear statement of where the government still wants to keep the incentive tap open.

2015	National Offshore Wind Energy Policy First framework for leasing offshore blocks within India's exclusive economic zone.
2018	National Wind-Solar Hybrid Policy Framework for co-located wind-solar plants sharing land and transmission infrastructure.
2022	Wind-specific RPO trajectory notified A dedicated wind sub-target — 0.67% rising to 3.48% by 2030 — carved out of the blended RE purchase obligation.
2023	Offshore Wind Lease Rules; National Repowering & Life Extension Policy Legal basis for seabed leasing notified; repowering incentives formalised, ~25 GW opportunity identified.
2024	₹7,453 cr offshore VGF scheme approved; Tamil Nadu repowering policy Cabinet clears viability-gap funding for a first 1 GW offshore tranche (Gujarat + Tamil Nadu); TN becomes first state with a dedicated repowering law.
2025	ISTS waiver phase-down begins; CERC's solar/non-solar hour access reform Full ISTS waiver ends for standalone RE (30 Jun); CERC's Third Amendment creates dedicated non-solar-hour transmission access for wind and storage.
2026	Wind RCO layered onto RPO; record 6.05 GW added in FY26 A distinct wind consumption obligation for large consumers; offshore tenders for the first 1 GW tranche expected to be floated.

A DECADE-LONG BUILD, FUNDED ONE GIGAWATT AT A TIME

Offshore: The Patient-Capital Bet

Offshore is where I'd urge clients to calibrate their patience, not their optimism. India has identified roughly 36 GW of offshore wind potential off Gujarat and 35 GW off Tamil Nadu, backed by over a decade of resource assessment. In June 2024, the Cabinet approved a ₹7,453 crore viability-gap-funding scheme — ₹6,853 crore to get a first 1 GW built (500 MW off each coast) and ₹600 crore to upgrade two ports for the outsized logistics offshore construction demands. That first tranche is meant to seed an ecosystem for a much larger 37 GW national bidding trajectory through 2030, and as of late 2025 the government had signalled it would float tenders for that first 1 GW around early-to-mid 2026.

India's two identified offshore wind zones: NIWE-assessed resource potential vs. the first VGF-backed 1 GW tranche approved by Cabinet in June 2024.

The honest caveat, and one worth stating plainly: even after the VGF subsidy, analysts at Ember estimate the levelised cost of India's first offshore tender lands around ₹5/kWh against a pre-determined tariff closer to ₹4.5/kWh — an uncovered gap that reflects both a still-immature domestic offshore supply chain and a lower-than-ideal capacity utilisation factor (roughly 36% for the initial Gujarat site) against international benchmarks of 40–50%.

Tamil Nadu's site shows a much stronger theoretical CUF potential — up to 60% — but its metocean data is still preliminary compared with Gujarat's more extensively studied waters.

FIELD NOTE

I think of offshore wind less like a renewable-energy project and more like a metro-rail line or a nuclear plant: enormous upfront capital, a construction timeline measured in years rather than quarters, and returns that only make sense once you stop discounting them at the same rate as a rooftop solar rollout. India didn't get its metro systems by waiting for them to be instantly cost-competitive with buses — it built the first line as proof of concept and let the economics improve with scale and experience. Offshore wind is at exactly that stage today. The first gigawatt won't be cheap. It's not supposed to be; it's supposed to prove the model.

WHY WIND'S SUPPLY CHAIN MATTERS AS MUCH AS ITS ELECTRONS

The Manufacturing Dividend

There's a strategic angle to wind that tends to get lost in pure levelised-cost comparisons: India already makes most of a wind turbine at home. Industry estimates put domestic content in Indian wind projects at around 65%, against closer to 20% for solar — a gap that matters enormously given how exposed India's solar supply chain still is to a handful of Chinese module and cell manufacturers. India already has upwards of 17 domestic wind manufacturing companies with a combined annual capacity around 17 GW, exporting turbines and blades to Australia, Brazil, Europe and the United States.

Suzlon's own turnaround is as good a proxy for sector sentiment as any single data point I can offer: in its most recent reported quarter, the company posted revenue up 85% year-on-year, EBITDA up 145%, net profit at a thirty-year high, and an order book of 6.2 GW — its strongest ever. That's not a company riding a subsidy. That's a company whose order book reflects the same procurement logic this piece has been building: developers are buying wind again because the grid economics now reward it.

FIELD NOTE

This is the same playbook India ran with generic pharmaceuticals and auto components: don't just chase the cheapest imported input, build the domestic manufacturing depth so the supply chain itself becomes a hedge against the next trade shock. Solar learned this lesson late and is still paying for it in anti-dumping duties and module-availability headaches. Wind, almost by accident of its slower growth decade, never lost that depth.

The employment case is smaller in absolute terms than solar's rooftop-installation workforce, but structurally deeper: IRENA estimated around 40,000 direct wind-sector jobs in India in 2022, and CEEW's workforce research — spanning business development, design, construction and long-term operations and maintenance — projects the sector's employment base growing roughly six-fold by 2030 as both onshore build-out and offshore development scale up.

WHERE THE CAPACITY SITS — AND HOW MUCH RUNWAY IS LEFT

The State Scorecard

Gujarat overtook Tamil Nadu as India's largest wind state only in 2023, and by June 2026 held just over 16 GW installed against Tamil Nadu's roughly 12.3 GW, Karnataka's 8.9 GW, Maharashtra's 6.3 GW and Rajasthan's 5.5 GW. What strikes me every time I pull this data isn't the ranking — it's the headroom underneath it. NIWE's resource assessment at 120 metres above ground puts Gujarat's potential alone at over 142 GW; even the state furthest along has tapped barely a ninth of what its own wind atlas says is there.

Installed wind capacity (June 2026) vs. NIWE-assessed wind potential at 120m above ground level, top five wind states by installed capacity.

State	Installed (Jun 2026)	FY25-26 generation	NIWE potential @120m
Gujarat	16,087 MW	33,706 MU	142.6 GW
Tamil Nadu	12,274 MW	24,200 MU	n/a (offshore: 35 GW)
Karnataka	8,896 MW	18,804 MU	124.2 GW
Maharashtra	6,318 MW	8,610 MU	98.2 GW
Rajasthan	5,516 MW	7,345 MU	127.8 GW
Andhra Pradesh	4,461 MW	8,902 MU	74.9 GW

Twenty-one of India's twenty-seven states, per resource-adequacy plans reviewed by Ember, now project contracting more than 100 GW of wind by 2030 — including states with essentially no domestic wind resource of their own, like Odisha, Jharkhand, Punjab and Bihar, which are simply planning to import wind power from resource-rich states via inter-state transmission. That's a broader base of demand-side conviction than wind has ever had in India, and it's arriving right as the CERC transmission reform above makes moving that power around materially easier.

Who's actually building right now

The installed-capacity ranking tells you the story so far. It doesn't tell you who's still writing the next chapter. India added a record 6,057 MW of wind in FY2025-26, and the state split is lopsided even by this sector's standards: Gujarat alone accounted for almost half of it.

State share of India's record 6,057 MW of new wind capacity added in FY2025-26 — a 44% jump on FY2024-25. Source: JMK Research & Analytics (Apr 2026).

The FY2025-26 leaderboard doesn't quite match the all-time installed-capacity ranking, and that gap is worth sitting with. Tamil Nadu, still comfortably the second-largest wind state on cumulative capacity, added a comparatively modest share of new wind in the same period — its growth is increasingly coming from the repowering pipeline discussed earlier rather than greenfield build, which is exactly what a mature, land-constrained wind market with some of the country's oldest turbines ought to look like.

The state wind-policy landscape

Put the ToD patchwork and the wind-specific policy layer side by side, and a pattern emerges: states that have written wind a dedicated line item in their own energy policy are, generally, the states building it with more conviction than those leaving it inside an undifferentiated “renewable energy” target.

State	Installed (Jun 2026)	Headline state wind/RE policy	ToD solar-hour status
Gujarat	16,087 MW	Cumulative RE target only; no wind sub-target	Flat ₹0.60/unit rebate (11am–5pm FY27); no surcharge
Tamil Nadu	12,274 MW	First dedicated Repowering Policy (2024); RE policy not updated	No solar-hour rebate; peak +25% (bimodal)
Karnataka	8,896 MW	RE Policy 2022–27 (cumulative, not wind-specific)	Not yet adopted — no surplus solar
Maharashtra	6,318 MW	RE Policy 2020 sets explicit wind targets	Solar −15 to −25%; peak +25% (C&I)
Rajasthan	5,516 MW	ICE Policy 2024: 25 GW wind & hybrid by FY30	Off-peak −25%; peak +30%
Andhra Pradesh	4,461 MW	ICE Policy 2024: 20 GW wind by 2030	Mainly Open Access; retail ToD developing

Only Maharashtra and Rajasthan currently carve out an explicit wind capacity number inside their state policy; Gujarat, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh fold wind into a broader cumulative renewable target, and Tamil Nadu and Telangana — India's original and one of its more promising wind markets, respectively — are, per Ember's review, still working from renewable energy policies that haven't been refreshed even as the repowering-specific and offshore-specific rules around them have moved fast.

The next wave: Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh bet big

The two most recent comprehensive state clean-energy policies — Rajasthan's Integrated Clean Energy Policy, 2024 and Andhra Pradesh's ICE Policy, 2024 — both treat wind as a named, numbered component rather than an implicit share of a solar-dominated total. Rajasthan's 125 GW target for FY2029-30 breaks down as 90 GW solar, 25 GW wind and hybrid, and 10 GW of other firm capacity; Andhra Pradesh's 2030 goals name 40 GW solar, 20 GW wind and 12 GW of pumped storage alongside battery and green-hydrogen ambitions.

State clean-energy target composition: Rajasthan's Integrated Clean Energy Policy 2024 (125 GW by FY 2029-30) vs. Andhra Pradesh's ICE Policy 2024 2030 targets.

Andhra Pradesh is already putting capital behind the number: in May 2025, ReNew announced a roughly ₹22,000 crore hybrid project in Anantapur district combining 1.8 GW of solar, 1 GW of wind and 2 GWh of battery storage at a single site — designed explicitly to supply firm power through several peak hours a day, not just whenever the sun happens to cooperate.

FIELD NOTE

In my consulting work I've seen this pattern in corporate sustainability budgets too: a lump “renewable energy” line item quietly becomes almost entirely solar by default, because solar is cheaper per rupee, faster to build, and easier to explain to a board in one slide. A business unit only reliably gets its share of wind when someone attaches a wind-specific number to a wind-specific deadline. Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh have just done exactly that at the state-policy level, and Maharashtra did it five years earlier. In my experience, the states that leave wind inside an undifferentiated renewable target are, quietly and consistently, the states where it doesn't get built.

A CANDID LOOK AT THE HEADWINDS, BECAUSE A CONSULTANT WHO ONLY SELLS YOU THE UPSIDE ISN'T DOING THEIR JOB

What Still Needs Fixing?

None of this is a case for uncritical enthusiasm, and I'd be doing readers a disservice if I left the headwinds out.

• RPO compliance is genuinely weak. Only a small minority of states have historically met their notified renewable purchase trajectory in any given year; a wind-specific carve-out is only as strong as the state regulator's willingness to enforce it.

• Land and micrositing remain harder for wind than solar. Wind farms need larger, often hillier or forested terrain, with land typically owned by states while auctions are run centrally — a coordination problem MNRE's 2024 micrositing guidelines have only partly eased.

• Open-access cross-subsidy treatment still tilts against wind in several states, with less predictable surcharge and banking rules than solar open-access buyers typically face.

• Transmission congestion and curtailment are real and rising in the RE-rich western and southern corridors, even as new circuit-kilometres are added — grid build-out has, in recent years, run behind the Central Electricity Authority's own targets.

• Tariffs have crept up, not down. Discovered wind tariffs have risen from a record low of ₹2.43/unit in 2017 to the ₹3.60–3.70/unit range in the most recent large tenders — the opposite trajectory of solar, and a genuine test of wind's cost competitiveness even as its value proposition strengthens.

• The reverse-auction mechanism itself has been unstable — replaced with a closed-bid process, then reinstated in 2024 after tariffs rose — which is exactly the kind of regulatory whiplash that makes long-horizon project financing harder to underwrite.

None of these is fatal, and several — the transmission access reform in particular — are already being actively addressed. But I'd treat any pitch for the sector that glosses over them with real suspicion.

CLOSING THE LOOP

Second Wind, Not Nostalgia

Put the pieces together and the destination gets easier to see, even if the exact route stays contested. The Central Electricity Authority's 14th National Electricity Plan calls for wind capacity to reach 122 GW by March 2032, more than doubling today's base.

An independent CEEW pathway analysis, modelling India's 2030 grid at 15-minute resolution, goes further — arguing the country should target 600 GW of non-fossil capacity rather than 500 GW, with 148 GW of it in wind, precisely because a higher-renewables, higher-storage system turns out to be the more reliable and the cheaper one once you actually simulate the evening ramp hour by hour. Of the government's own 500 GW target for 2030, the wind industry's own trade body puts the sector's fair share at a full 100 GW — up from under 50 GW of wind's roughly 20% current share of the country's renewable mix.

I don't think wind is going to out-build solar in raw gigawatts added per year any time this decade, and I wouldn't advise a client to bet on that. That was never really the argument. The argument is that a power system trying to run on solar alone is a bowling attack of only fast bowlers — brutally effective in exactly one set of conditions, and exposed everywhere else.

Wind's comeback isn't a rejection of solar's success; it's the system finally paying for the one thing solar structurally cannot supply on its own: electrons after the sun goes down, in the season the sun goes missing, and in the states the sun never quite reaches as reliably as the wind does.

That's not nostalgia for wind's first act in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat thirty years ago. It's a straightforward reading of where the price signals, the transmission rules and the tariff orders are all, independently, starting to point.

Rathin Vyas

(Harvard & Cambridge Certified RE + Sustainability Specialist)

CEO & Co-founder

ENERCO Energy Solutions LLP

EnercoEnergySolutions.com