Infrastructure India, an investment company focused on India’s transport and energy sectors, has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Indian Energy, has successfully converted its Theni wind farm to a group captive power project, thereby increasing the potential future returns from the project.
The Theni project is located in Tamil Nadu and has an installed capacity of 16.5 MW. Since commissioning in August 2010, the power generated from the project has been sold to the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation
The What & Why of Group Captive?
A consumer buying electricity from inside or outside the state via open access, ends up paying electricity charge to the generator plus the wheeling charges depending upon intra- or inter-state and then the cross-subsidy surcharge. The sum of these three invariably makes open access electricity purchase an unviable option.
Consumers of group captive power need not pay cross-subsidy charges as they are exempted for a captive power plant under section 42 of the Electricity Act, 2003. Adding to this benefit, the electricity duty is also being waived off.
The above two benefits make the group captive route a far more sustainable option to open access. Thus, with much less investments than what your company will have to do for owning a captive power plant, you get benefits similar to owing one.
If that is the benefit for a power purchaser, for a wind farm owner, it has been seen that group captive provides attractive returns over sales to the grid.
More info on wind group captive from here