RE-Invest 2024: Bringing low-cost funds for RE expansion will be top priority, says IREDA CMD

See, India’s renewable growth story is a lesson at the global level. If you see the speed at which the area has grown in the country, in particular, solar, in the last 10 years, it has grown 33 times. No country, no industry has grown like this in history, perhaps. The ecosystem that India has built — of regulator, policy maker, lender and developer — that has happened in India. And we have grown very fast and we have grown in a very disciplined manner. That is the key essence for renewable energy growth.

So, therefore, in the time to come, the focus of the government would be to continue the cohesive and disciplined ecosystem of these four agents — policy maker, regulator, developer and lender — to handle each other, work with full transparency in a committed manner and timeline delivery methodology.

The new and emerging areas in the renewable space will have a lot of challenges. However, identifying those challenges and taking a corrective and timely action to address those challenges, as the government has been doing for other segments in the renewable energy space for the past several years, will be important. Since we have a continuity of governance and our Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) is very passionate, very committed towards RE, I am confident that India is going to maintain that kind of stability and strength what they have exhibited in last 10 years.

At the same time, we, as lenders and developers, have to have a very disciplined and sensible approach. All the agencies are going to work with full responsibility to hand-hold each other, to ensure that 500 GW is established by 2030, to ensure that by 2047 we are creating a Viksit Bharat. To become Viksit Bharat, all the sectors of India have to grow. If all the sectors have to grow, then all the sectors need energy. And growth in energy essentially has to come from renewable energy. The demand and the business size is quite promising already. Only we have to maintain a disciplined approach in project execution and project commissioning. And we need to ensure the best sourcing of funds so that the project cost can come down. Lenders want how best you can minimise the cost of the project so that they can make the project bankable.

IREDA’s loanbook size is Rs 63,000 crore, and borrowing is almost Rs 54,000 crore. We have 16 percent forex and 84 percent domestic. What we have experienced in the last four years is that the landed cost of forex is not cheap. The major culprit is hedging, which is 3 percent to 3.5 percent. Therefore, we have opened an office in GIFT City, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. We will be channelising the funding of overseas borrowing and overseas lending to our existing developers, who are setting up the project or who have export potential. So, natural hedging will happen. That is one. Second, when we take overseas loans, the government levies guarantee fees. Since, we are purely in the green energy space, we have requested the government to waive this levy. This will allow us to save around 50-70 bps which we can pass on to the borrowers.

We have also requested 54 EC capital gain bonds from the Government of India. Fourthly, we have submitted a proposal on green taxonomy to the government. That submission has been forwarded to the Finance Ministry and all the stakeholders and it is a work in progress. In the proposal, we have classified what will be considered as green. Second, we have proposed that 5 percent of the Assets Under Management (AUM) of pension funds, provident funds, gratuity funds, insurance funds, LIC and other insurance agencies be earmarked for green bond. So that there will be a bond market for green tax. If you take today’s AUM, 5 percent of that comes to around Rs 3.5 lakh crore. So, straight away, there will be an organised bond market for green energy of Rs 3.5 lakh crores, which can be accessed by IREDA and other lenders as well.

We will be resorting to global markets… wherever cheaper funds, green funds are available. Recently we have attained our international rating by S&P. So, we will be approaching them. Bringing funds from cheapest sources, be it internationally or nationally, and then passing on the benefit to the disciplined developer will be our strategy. So that our project profile is maintained. That is our main focus.

We have targets to reach around Rs 3.5 lakh crore by 2030. We have submitted a roadmap for becoming a Maharatna by 2029 or 2030. So by that time, our book size will be Rs 3.5 lakh crore. IREDA’s corporate governance is top-notch, our Non-Performing Assets (NPA) is already low at 0.95 percent in Q1 of FY2024-25, which was 1.61 percent in the same quarter of FY2023-24. Going forward, our main focus will be growing our loanbook while keeping our NPA low.