India has one of the world’s oldest and largest renewable energy (RE) auction programmes. As early as 2010, competitive bids were invited for utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) projects as part of the country’s National Solar Mission, which set out to install 100 GW of solar PV by 2022. Since then, the RE sector has grown fast. Driven mainly by falling costs, renewables accounted for 23.5 per cent of installed capacity and 10 per cent of total power output by early 2020 – increasing from 13 and 5 per cent respectively in 2015.

In this report, the authors focus primarily on the design, implementation and results of RE auctions run by SECI between January 2017 and June 2020. They provide an overview of the country’s power sector, describe the RE auction programme, the bidding process and the results of the auctions. The main lessons learned and some recommendations are outlined and their conclusions.