Govt extends deadline to submit bids for building solar power equipment

New Delhi: India has extended a deadline to submit bids for building solar power equipment factories in the South Asian nation, in another delay to its efforts to boost its nascent domestic manufacturing capacity.

The new deadline to submit bids for the tender is 11 September , Solar Energy Corp. of India said on its website on Monday. The tender seeks to set up four projects for module, cell, ingot and wafer manufacturing with an annual capacity of 500 megawatts each. In addition, developers have to build solar farms of up to 1.5 gigawatts of generation capacity.

India currently depends on cheap Chinese imports to offer low-priced clean electricity. It issued the tender in June after two earlier efforts to spur its domestic industry failed to rouse investor interest. The country’s first tender, issued in May 2018, was downsized and delayed multiple times. It was replaced by a smaller version in January, which was also delayed several times before being canceled.

Source: Live Mint