Policies to accelerate the growth of offshore wind energy sector in India

India's power generation capacity needs to be augmented to, support the growing demands for electricity. India, which has predominantly used fossil fuels to power its generators need to make a switch to clean energy fuels. But renewable sources form a miniscule portion (26 GW,similar to 12%) of India's overall installed power capacity (210 GW). There is no contribution from offshore wind farms to the energy basket for India, as there is no policy framework to encourage the development of offshore wind farms. Several European countries have tapped the offshore wind energy potential to reduce their dependence on adopted by these countries to identify the core components (21 of them) of robust policy intervention. A detailed questionnaire was administered to 181 stakeholders of wind energy in India to seek their feedback on these building blocks. These core components (variables in research parlance) are then subjected to factor analysis to understand the underlying structure of the variables. The factor analysis logically reduces these 21 variables into five factors (Government support, fiscal and quota based incentives, availability of local expertise, capital for investments and building an enabling R&D ecosystem), which are then fed into a logistic regression model as 'independent variables' to predict the probability of growth of offshore wind energy (dependent variable) in the country. The logistic regression model gives the weight (the impact) of these independent variables in influencing the growth of offshore wind energy in India. It emerges that government support, fiscal and quota based incentives and building an enabling R&D ecosystem have a much higher impact on the growth of offshore wind energy for India. This paper fills the gap of absence of an empirically tested framework on offshore wind energy policy for India. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.