Growing Opportunities in Decentralized Renewable Energy (DRE) Projects in India

Large parts of rural India still don’t have access to electricity owing to the limited penetration of grid electricity in the remote rural areas. Although this is unfortunate, it has opened up enormous opportunities for businesses that specialize in setting up decentralized off-grid power infrastructure such as mini solar, wind and biomass-based plants. However, investments in the sector require a thorough enterprise assessment in the target area to help understand if the capital will be appropriately absorbed and whether it has the potential of bringing in the expected ROI (Return on Investment).

To enter into such a venture, you will also require a renewable energy enterprise evaluation to assess the potential of your organization to operate in this sector. This is not easy and involves a considerable amount time, effort and expenditure to go to the remote rural areas of a vast country like India and figure out investment opportunities. This is where a tool like DREEM (Decentralized Renewable Energy Evaluation & Monitoring) comes with a whole range of guidance parameters for you to understand the investment opportunities:

• Users could begin with identifying regions for investment - get a district-wise update of renewable energy variables like solar, wind, hydro and biomass power along with specific ratings of the products/ solutions
• Results are presented in an easy-to-understand interactive map where all the districts of India are shown with updates of installation of the renewable energy variables
• It helps narrow down the districts that offer the maximum investment opportunity

Knowing where to invest is essential, but it is just the first of a series to steps that you need to take to move ahead on the roadmap to invest in a DRE project. As a holistic tool designed to empower entrepreneurs into making informed investment decisions, DREEM offers many other renewable energy enterprise assessment options that inform the entrepreneur about the viability of a project.

As a DRE entrepreneur, one would like to access capital from financial institutions which is another major challenge if you step out on your own without prior groundwork. DREEM offers realistic renewable energy enterprise evaluation on three significant parameters that will:

• Help you assess your compatibility with laid down specifications for new entrepreneurs
• The banks and other financial institutions who are major stakeholders in these DRE projects can also access the tool to measure the risk to their investment capital.
• Various industry benchmarks are used to evaluate the external factors that affect the sector, the challenges, and opportunities within the industry and finally, the growth story of the enterprise.

Dreem helps off-grid enterprises as well as financial institutions assess the potential of a given business by evaluating geography of operations or expansion, intended or current energy resource utilized and the off-grid product/ solution offered.