India's wind power capacity to rocket up to 2500MW in 2016-2017

But its untapped potential is still mired in issues.

According to CARE Ratings' recenty published outlook on India's wind power projects, the total installed capacity of renewable power projects as on March 31, 2015 aggregates to 35.77 GW (excluding 41.27 GW of large hydro projects) against the total potential capacity of 249.19 GW. 

India has wind potential of around 102.77 GW out of which the total installed capacity as on March 31, 2015 was 23.44 GW with an untapped potential of about 77%. A major part of capacity addition and exploitation of wind potential in the future is expected from private sector projects.

"The overall installations of wind power projects are better during FY15. Going forward, considering the wind power projects in pipeline with various IPP’s it is expected that the capacity additions would grow between 2000 MW to 2500 MW during FY16 - FY17. During 5MFY16, the total wind capacity additions remained at 645 MW," CARE Ratings said.

Here's more from CARE Ratings: 

Huge untapped potential in wind power is attributed to lower Plant Load Factor (PLF) in comparison to fossil fuel, nuclear and hydropower plants. Furthermore, due to the limitation of grid infrastructure, it has been found that the amount of energy produced from wind farms could not be effectively transmitted to consumers causing wastage of energy.

However, the financing structure of wind power projects in India is still bound in uncertainty due to aforementioned issues though the untapped potential is huge the extent to which the same can fructify still remains uncertain.

As on January 2014, states like Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu had utilized their overall wind energy potential by more than 50%. Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh on the other hand has estimated wind potential of 13.6 GW, 2.9 GW, 35.1 GW and 14.5 GW, spread across 26, 7, 40
and 32 wind farmable sites out of which it has been able to utilize only 17%, 13%, 10% and 4% respectively of capacity.