A report by Climate Trends and Centre for Financial Accountability
100% of project finance went to renewable energy projects in 2022, coal power projects didn’t get any project finance. However, project finance to RE declined by 45% compared to 2021.
This analysis assessed 68 project finance loans across 11 coal and renewable energy projects in India that reached financial closure between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022. Renewable energy projects are defined as either hydroelectric, geothermal, wave, wind or solar power projects. However, this report will look at wind and solar project finance loans only. Total project finance loans amounted to INR 18,577 crore (USD 2.36 billion), of which 100% flowed into renewable energy projects. The total capacity across all projects identified was 2.943 gigawatts (GW).
Deals were initially identified using Bloomberg Professional, a subscription-based financial database. Previous reports included the analysis of more sources, which might affect the total sum of deals. However, the Bloomberg Professional database gives the most complete picture of financial deals. Where there was missing information on the deals, they were cross-checked with various resources, including company records, market disclosures and media reports. These sources were then evaluated to determine whether they should be included in our analysis. Four loans were left out of this report due to a lack of information.
Importantly, this analysis only included project finance lending and excluded corporate lending. All dollar amounts are in US dollars (USD) unless otherwise stated. All lending was either in Indian Rupees (INR), Japanese Yen (JPY) or USD. The value of each loan is the amount specified on the date of financial closure. This analysis used Bloomberg Professional to convert and aggregate lending, using the average exchange rate for 2022.
This report is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all power sector loans in India. Rather, it provides a snapshot of the project finance landscape for coal and renewable energy. As the number of project finance loans was significantly lower than in previous years, partly due to a change in our methodology as we used one source instead of three, it will not make comparisons to previous iterations of this report published in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Read the full report here: Coal Vs RE report 2023
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