Poster Child for Green Energy Becomes Buyer of Emergency Power

The road out of my hometown in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu runs between rows of wind turbines. For most of my life I treated them as scenery, admiring them as a technical marvel.

Danish engineers helped install the state’s first 110 turbines between 1985 and 1992, and the Muppandal cluster in Kanyakumari district grew into India’s largest onshore wind farm at 1.5 gigawatts. By 2012, wind was delivering up to 35% of the state’s electricity for days at a stretch, a share that industry observers said only Denmark had matched.

In 2017, a friend who ran a factory told me how erratic swings in electricity supply had caused damage and lost orders, wiping out months of profits. He linked the problem to the surging and fading of wind power on the grid. That was a warning. Nine years later, the entire state is experiencing the same grid failures at a far higher cost.

Poster child no more

Few Indian states received as much international praise for its renewable energy as Tamil Nadu. In 2018, the World Economic Forum recognized the state for generating more wind power than Sweden or Denmark, the Scandinavian countries that climate activists hold up as models.