Despite its shareholders like Sweden’s EQT and Singapore’s Temasek starting the process of exiting the company, renewable energy firm, O2 Power, is looking to scale up from 1.1-1.5 Gw to 2.5-3 GW a year. Founder and CEO Parag Sharma in an interview with Raghavendra Kamath discusses future plans and how raising funds will not be a problem for the company. Excerpts:
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Developing nations are talking about fossil fuel addition to mitigate their rising power demand. Will this affect the growth of renewable energy?
In the last decade, the capacity of coal-based power plants have gone up only by 11%, but renewable would have tripled or increased very significantly. So, it’s a matter of time when you will see a year when the net coal base addition is zero.
You have talked about scaling up from 1.1-1.5 GW to 2.5-3.0 GW a year. How do you plan to do this?
This is in the ratio at which the domestic market is growing. Last year, there were only three companies who did more than one gigawatt, and that was the norm. Doing one gigawatt was big. Slowly, the norm will become two and three gigawatt. So market is growing. Last year, India did 18 GW. This year, India will do 30GW, hopefully next year, it will do more than that. So we will also grow and maintain our market share. And that’s why I said the team that we have built can easily do not only just one and a half, which we are doing now, but two and a half GW or better than that.
You said the company would need around $250 million to $300 million for this capacity addition. Have you tied up funds for this?
A lot of companies are interested in investing in this sector, and it is not just private capital, but companies are also going public. ACME Solar has gone public, which is our peer company, and within this month NTPC Green is also going public. So there are so many means to raise capital quickly, we don’t see that as a challenge. Raising $200 million to $300 million will never be a difficult.
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