HAMBURG, Sept. 22
India is on course to add as much as 8 gigawatts of wind power capacity in the current financial year, building on a record expansion in 2025-26 as the country works towards more than doubling its installed wind capacity by the end of the decade.
Rajesh Kulhari, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said India was expected to add between 7.5 GW and 8 GW of wind capacity during 2026-27. He was speaking at the EU-India Wind Energy Business Summit 2026 at WindEnergy Hamburg on Tuesday.
The projection would represent a further acceleration after India added more than 6 GW of wind capacity in 2025-26. During the first five months of the current financial year, from April through August, another 2.42 GW was installed, according to figures cited by the ministry.
India’s total installed wind generation capacity stood at 58.52 GW as of August 31, 2026. The government is targeting more than 100 GW by 2030, meaning the country will need to add more than 40 GW over the remaining period to meet that objective.
The 7.5-8 GW expected this year would therefore be an important step towards the 2030 target. If achieved, it would also exceed the more than 6 GW added during the previous financial year.
Wind power forms part of India’s wider effort to expand renewable electricity generation and reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. The government has set an overall target of reaching 500 GW of renewable energy capacity, making the pace at which individual renewable technologies can be deployed increasingly important.
India has traditionally built much of its wind capacity in states with favourable wind resources, while the country’s renewable-energy expansion has increasingly been dominated by solar power. The latest wind additions indicate that wind is expected to retain an important place in the broader renewable-energy mix as electricity demand continues to increase.
The sector also has a different generation profile from solar. Combining multiple renewable sources can help diversify electricity generation across different times of the day and seasons, although integrating larger amounts of variable renewable power also requires corresponding investment in transmission, storage and grid management.
Kulhari’s remarks in Hamburg were made during a summit focused on cooperation between India and the European Union in wind energy. He assured European participants of India’s cooperation in the renewable-energy sector.
The setting is significant because European companies have decades of experience in wind-turbine manufacturing, project development and offshore wind technology, while India represents one of the world’s largest potential renewable-energy markets.
The Business Standard report, however, does not provide details of new agreements, investments or projects arising from the summit, and Kulhari’s comments should therefore be viewed primarily as a statement of India’s capacity-addition expectations rather than the announcement of a new bilateral programme.
For India, the immediate test will be whether installations during the remainder of FY27 can accelerate sufficiently to reach the ministry’s projection.
With 2.42 GW commissioned between April and August, achieving the lower end of the government’s 7.5 GW projection would require another 5.08 GW to be added between September and March. Reaching 8 GW would require 5.58 GW over the same period.
The target is ambitious, but the previous year’s addition of more than 6 GW suggests that India’s wind sector has already moved into a faster phase of deployment.
The longer-term challenge is larger. Moving from 58.52 GW at the end of August to more than 100 GW by 2030 requires sustained annual additions rather than a single strong year.
India’s renewable-energy ambitions increasingly depend not simply on announcing capacity targets but on maintaining the pace of project commissioning, expanding transmission infrastructure and ensuring that growing amounts of renewable electricity can be absorbed reliably by the grid.
For wind power, FY27 will provide an early measure of that acceleration. If the government’s 7.5-8 GW projection is achieved, India will record another substantial annual increase and move closer to making wind a larger component of the renewable-energy system it is seeking to build by 2030.
