West Bengal is among India’s most populous and coal-rich states. For more than three decades until 2011, it had been governed by a communist government, which appeared to stunt growth of private sector activity in renewables. Still, the state is home to some of India’s oldest solar equipment manufacturers.
West Bengal has a privately-owned distribution utility serving its capital Kolkata but state-owned utilities predominate elsewhere. State utilities are in good financial health and were rated ‘A’ in 2013 by the Ministry of Power. West Bengal has total power generation capacity of 10GW with coal accounting for 8.6GW. Renewables play a small role in the power matrix at 400MW, or 4% with nearly all of that small hydro and biomass. Grid-connected solar capacity is miniscule at roughly 7MW.
Slow growth in renewable energy capacity can also be attributed to the state’s claim of having a power surplus. West Bengal does not have particularly good wind resources and it has been formulating policies for the growth of rooftop and net-metering based solar.
Availability of land and its timely acquisition is also a constraint. In recent times, the government has spoken of using state-owned barren land for utility scale solar projects and disclosed plans for setting up a 250MW project.
West Bengal was one of the first to install solar micro-grids in India to bring electricity to the densely forested Sunderbans delta region. The state has an active micro-grid sector especially within the remote tribal areas. Many of these projects are being set up within the national rural electrification program’s decentralized distribution and generation component for remote villages.