Essar Renewables to put Rs 4,500 crore into a 300 MW solar, wind and battery project in Andhra Pradesh after NHPC deal

Essar Renewables will sell power from a 300 MW renewable project in Andhra Pradesh to the state-run NHPC Limited under a newly signed purchase deal, and its parent Essar Power will spend about Rs 4,500 crore to build the plant, the group said in a statement issued in Mumbai on Wednesday, 4 November.

The plant falls in a category known as Firm and Dispatchable Renewable Energy. Solar panels, wind turbines and a bank of batteries will sit in one project, so that electricity produced in sunny or windy hours can be held back and sent to the grid when demand calls for it. Essar has not named the district where the plant will come up, and it has not given a date for commissioning.

One piece of a 5 GW plan

Essar Power wants to assemble about 5 GW of generating capacity spread over renewable sources, thermal plants and gas-fired units, and the Andhra Pradesh plant is one part of that. Essar Renewables says it has already won three renewable energy tenders from two central public sector companies, NHPC and SJVN, with a combined awarded capacity of about 1 GW.

Ankur Kumar, chief executive of Essar Power, described the 300 MW project with NHPC as an important milestone in the company’s effort to build a renewable business at scale. Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, operating partner for infrastructure at the Essar Group, tied the investment to the country’s need for a dependable power supply as demand rises.

NHPC is a Navratna company under the Union Ministry of Power and the country’s largest hydropower developer. It has been adding solar and wind capacity over the past few years.

The Visakhapatnam MoU

The agreement comes a year after a much larger promise to the state. At the Visakhapatnam edition of the CII Partnership Summit in November 2025, Essar Renewables put its name to an MoU with the state government for 4 GW of clean power capacity backed by batteries, with a proposed outlay of about Rs 20,000 crore. Ankur Kumar, then chief executive of Essar Renewables, signed it in the presence of Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, and the company said at the time that the projects would create more than 7,000 jobs.

Essar has not said whether the 300 MW plant counts towards that 4 GW commitment. The tariff NHPC will pay and the length of the agreement have also not been made public.