Dilip Pantosh Patil uses an ox-drawn wooden plow to till the same land as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. But now he has a new neighbor: a shiny white wind turbine taller than a 20-story building, generating electricity at the edge of his bean field.

The Patils, father and son, plow a field below Indian wind towers. Wind power may still have an image as something of a plaything of environmentalists more concerned with clean energy than saving money. But it is quickly emerging as a serious alternative not just in affluent areas of the world but in fast-growing countries like India and China that are avidly seeking new energy sources. And leading the charge here in west-central India and elsewhere is an unlikely champion, Suzlon Energy, a homegrown Indian company.

Suzlon already dominates the Indian market and is now expanding rapidly abroad, having erected factories in locations as far away as Pipestone, Minn., and Tianjin, China. Four-fifths of the orders in Suzlon’s packed book now come from outside India. Not even on the list of the world’s top 10 wind-turbine manufacturers as recently as 2002, Suzlon passed Siemens of Germany last year to become the fifth-largest producer by installed megawatts of capacity. It still trails the market leader, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark, as well as General Electric, Enercon of Germany and Gamesa Tecnológica of Spain.

Suzlon’s past shows how a company can prosper by tackling the special needs of a developing country. Its present suggests a way of serving expanding energy needs without relying quite so much on coal, the fastest-growth fossil fuel now but also the most polluting. And Suzlon’s future is likely to be a case study of how a manufacturer copes with China, both in capturing sales there and in confronting competition from Chinese companies.

Suzlon is an outgrowth in many ways of India’s dysfunctional power- distribution system. Electricity boards owned by state governments charge industrial users more than twice as much for each kilowatt-hour as such customers pay in the United States — and they still suffer blackouts almost every day, especially in northern India.

Subject to political pressures, the boards are often slow to collect payments from residential consumers and well-connected businesses, especially before elections. As a result, they often lack the money to invest in new equipment. To stay open and prevent crucial industrial or computer processes from stopping, a wide range of businesses — including auto parts factories and outsourcing giants — rely on still more costly diesel generators.

With natural gas prices climbing as well, wind turbines have become attractive to Indian business. The Essar Group of Mumbai, a big industrial conglomerate active in shipping, steel and construction, is now working on plans for a wind farm near Chennai, formerly Madras, after concluding that regulatory changes in India have made it financially attractive. “The mechanisms didn’t used to be there; now they are,” said Jose Numpeli, vice president for operations at Essar Power. The electricity boards “know how to cost it, they know how to pay for it.”

Roughly 70 percent of the demand for wind turbines in India comes from industrial users seeking alternatives to relying on the grid, said Tulsi R. Tanti, Suzlon’s managing director. The rest of the purchases are made by a small group of wealthy families in India, for whom the tax breaks for wind turbines are attractive. Wind will remain competitive as long as the price of crude oil remains above $40 a barrel, Mr. Tanti estimated. To remain cost-effective below $40 a barrel, wind energy may require subsidies, or possibly carbon-based taxes on oil and other fossil fuels.

Mr. Tanti and his three younger brothers were running a textile business in Gujarat, in northwestern India, when they purchased a German wind turbine — only to find that they could not keep it running. So they decided to build and maintain turbines themselves, starting Suzlon in 1995 and later leaving the textile business.

To minimize land costs, wind farms are typically in rural areas, chosen for the strength of the wind there as well as low prices for land. But that can mean culture shock. “There were no big changes until the turbines came,” Mr. Patil said, pausing from plowing here with his father in this remote, hilly, tribal area 200 miles northeast of Mumbai, where oxen remain at the center of farm life and motorized vehicles are uncommon.

Doing business in rural areas of the developing world carries special challenges. The new Suzlon Energy wind farm in Khori is a subject of national pride. More than 300 giant wind turbines, with 110-foot blades, snatch electricity from the air. But it has also struggled with the sporadic lawlessness that bedevils India.
(By Keith Bradsher, NYT , 28/09/2006)