Interviews

Globally, the success of solar energy deployment has been completely dependent on certain external factors. India is no different. With an encouraging 2013, the industry was more confident about the next couple of years. However, with issues like key administrative changes and anti-dumping concerns, the investment decision was stalled by some international players.

Under the strong leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I got the opportunity to head the Heavy Industries Ministry in which BHEL comes under my purview. If you analyse BHEL´s financial progress in the past two-three years, the company has been under tremendous pressure, mainly due to the coal scam that shook India.

If you see, the Ministry of Power has flagged off 14 pilots on Smart Grid that they want to mobilise through tried and tested methods. Of the 14 pilots, one is already awarded in Mysore, and others are on their way. The pilots have all the functionalities of the Smart Grid starting from renewable integration to demand side management, peak load reduction and power quality

For IT consulting companies like us, there are a lot of opportunities on the analytics front. When Smart Grids are implemented through various applications, there will be a huge amount of data generated from applications like MDMS etc.

The renewable energy sector in India started during 1989 and has since increased its capacity to over 33,000 MW. It´s rapid growth has attracted a large pool of manpower into this sector and the industry has been quiet successful in generating the required talent.

The overall power scenario in India in terms of conventional energy is such that coal and gas are still the largest contributors. However, wind energy is the fastest moving alternate energy source with around 20-25 GW of installed capacity today.

Indo-African Chamber is a bilateral chamber which promotes India´s international trade to various African countries. Our main objective is to help Indian companies gauge their scale of preference and requirement to remove obstacles as far as business is concerned.

The major concerns of the power industry are coal supplies, land acquisition, environmental clearance and project delay costs. Solutions are being dealt with or found by the government; however, some of the ways forward can be as follows: a) CIL along with certain private miners should modernise and update their operational effectiveness

Legrand entered India by acquiring Morarjee Dortmund Smith in 1996, which was followed by acquiring Indo-Asian, Numeric UPS, and Adlec Systems. That said, Sameer Saxena, VP-Marketing, Legrand India, told POWER TODAY that the company is looking for right opportunities in ôsmartö space, M&A, and providing customised solutions to rural India.