French energy major Engie plans to invest about 3 billion in India to nearly triple its portfolio to 7 GW by 2030, betting on renewable energy, battery storage and emerging opportunities in data centres. The company aims to add about 1 GW annually as it seeks to move India into its group of leading markets. CEO Catherine MacGregor tells Kalpana Pathak how Engie plans to scale up while protecting returns, navigate grid and land constraints, and build its presence in the country's energy transition. Edited excerpts:
What are Engie's priorities in India?
What we want to do in India is support the country's renewable energy ambitions. Our focus right now is to develop new renewable energy projects as well as storage. Today, we have a portfolio of around 2 GW, including projects under construction and in operation, and we are looking to increase that to 7 GW by 2030. This would represent roughly 3 billion in new investment. We, therefore, need to add around 1 GW on average every year.
How will you fund the proposed 3 billion investment?
This could be a combination of debt and equity, which is being worked out right now. We have also applied to establish a treasury operation at GIFT City in Gujarat. This mechanism would help facilitate the financing of our projects.
How do you plan to add around 1 GW annually in an increasingly competitive market?
We are very focused on execution and certainty of delivery. It is a competitive market, so we want to protect returns. We are always open to inorganic opportunities as well. At the same time, we are building our execution capabilities across engineering, construction, operations and maintenance, including in-house capabilities. We believe this is the best way to create value. By managing projects through their entire lifecycle, we can learn from execution and operations and feed those learnings back into engineering and development. This helps us continuously improve project development and competitiveness.
Grid connectivity has emerged as a major challenge for renewable energy developers in India. How do you view this?
It is not just India; many parts of the world face this challenge. In fact, I think India has done a good job anticipating that the grid would become an issue. Renewable energy is distributed and decentralised by design. Moving from a model with a few large, centralised generation centres to multiple distributed generation centres requires many more grid connections. Sometimes our projects are ready but are waiting for connectivity. That is one of the bottlenecks.
Apart from grid connectivity, what are the major challenges to your growth in India?
Land access is one challenge. There is also congestion during solar generation hours, although it is not very significant in our case. This is where solar combined with battery energy storage systems (BESS) and the government's push towards storage can help. Batteries allow electricity supply to be spread across different periods of the day, which can help alleviate grid bottlenecks.
Engie has a much larger global portfolio, while India currently accounts for around 2 GW. How important is India to your global strategy?
India is currently a relatively small market for us in terms of the size of our portfolio. We operate across different businesses, so capacity is one way of looking at our presence. We want to add around 1 GW annually in India, which is significant compared with our global annual additions. Our ambition is to bring India into the group of our leading markets. We have a few large markets, including France, the UK, Belgium and Brazil. India is currently among our medium-sized markets, and the challenge for the team is to move it into the group of leading countries.