India’s growing installed capacity for electricity generation faces demands from surging domestic consumption, national energy security and obligations under climate change accords. It is exigent to increase focus on renewables as their share in net electricity generated may reach 22 % by 2030, against the goal of 40 % from non-fossil fuels by 2030 as pledged under the Paris Agreement. Wind energy is preferable at higher levels of renewables due to favourable capacity factors. Prior investigations necessary to develop wind farms are better achieved through reanalysis datasets than satellite-derived wind products, which are temporarily coarse and limited to off-shore regions.

In this study, we estimate wind power potential at 100 m level over the Indian domain using data from the ERA5 reanalysis for 1979–2018 through the Weibull mixture distribution. Our findings indicate that India’s mainland (off-shore) regions have a wind power potential of nearly 7.2 TW (18.4 TW), considering just 3 % of the available area. Further, up to 53 TW is available for exploitation over sparsely vegetated areas, which extend up to 25 % of India’s mainland. Future efforts for exploiting wind energy should focus on the availability of wind resources and their proximity to energy-hungry regions.

Fig. India's Wind Power Potential at 100m hub height

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