Mumbai: US renewable energy company SunEdison Inc expects to finalise within two months partners for around 1.7 gigawatts of planned projects in India, the company’s Asia head said on Friday, hours after the company filed for bankruptcy protection at home.
Apart from looking for partners for specific projects, the company will consider an equity partner for SunEdison's India business as a whole, Pashupathy Gopalan, president of SunEdison Asia Pacific, said by telephone from New York.
India accounts for a fifth of SunEdison’s total business and is its largest market outside its home base. SunEdison, once the fastest-growing US renewable energy company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday after a short-lived but aggressive binge of debt-fueled acquisitions proved unsustainable.
According to experts, SunEdison’s business model — building clean-energy plants and then spinning them off to listed companies — may also complicate its reorganisation. While two of its best known companies, Terra-Form Power Inc. and TerraForm Global Inc., are not part of the bankruptcy.
SunEdison has also drawn preliminary interest from Indian billionaire Gautam Adani's fast-expanding Adani Group, though a person close to Adani said the low tariff agreed for the Andhra plant would make any deal hard for Indian firms. SunEdison had won a proposed 500-megawatt plant in Andhra Pradesh last November after an aggressive bid.
According to some reports, Goldman Sachs-backed Indian renewable energy company, ReNew Power, is also in talks with SunEdison for the assets.
