SUZLON AND INDIA'S NEW WIND ORDER

As Adani enters turbine manufacturing with characteristic scale and speed, the pioneer finds itself at a crossroads

- T. Surendar & Satish John

Girish Tanti, vice chairman of Suzlon Energy (left) with J.P. Chalasani, the chief executive officer.

When Adani Wind supplied its first external turbine order, 3.3MW machines for a 70MW project for Opera Energy, a renewable energy company in Gujarat, it did more than add a customer.

It signalled intent. After scaling India's renewable energy landscape faster than anyone else, across solar parks, transmission networks and green hydrogen, the Adani Group now wants to manufacture wind turbines not just for itself, but for the market.

The ambition is vast. Adani has said it wants to deploy around 30GW of wind capacity by 2030, or a third of the country's 100GW target by then. Until recently, Adani's turbine manufacturing was widely assumed to be a captive exercise, designed primarily to feed the group's own rapidly expanding power needs. The Opera Energy order has punctured that assumption. Adani is positioning itself as a supplier, not merely a buyer, and is clearly testing whether its capital strength and execution speed can be translated into credibility in a business that judges performance over decades rather than quarters.

For Suzlon Energy Ltd, India's largest wind turbine maker and one of the few global survivors in a brutally cyclical industry, the timing is unsettling. The company has only just emerged from a long financial winter. It is debt-free, profitable again, and benefiting from a renewed policy and market push for wind as India confronts a structural mismatch in its power mix.

Yet, just as conditions turn favourable, a new class of capital heavy competitors is stepping in. Apart from Adani, the JSW Group and Reliance Industries Ltd have also disclosed their intent to manufacture turbines. These are conglomerates that can absorb early losses, compress supply chains and tolerate long gestation periods.