Adani comes for wind turbines, testing Suzlon’s hard-won calm

aid it wants to deploy around 30GW of wind capacity by 2030, or a third of the country’s 100GW target by then. Until recently, Adani’s turbine manufacturing was widely assumed to be a captive exercise, designed primarily to feed the group’s own rapidly expanding power needs. The Opera Energy order has punctured that assumption.

Adani is positioning itself as a supplier, not merely a buyer, and is clearly testing whether its capital strength and execution speed can be translated into credibility in a business that judges performance over decades rather than quarters.For Suzlon Energy Ltd, India’s largest wind turbine maker and one of the few global survivors in a brutally cyclical industry, the timing is unsettling. The company has only just emerged from a long financial winter. It is debt-free, profitable again, and benefiting from a renewed policy and market push for wind as India confronts a structural mismatch in its power mix.Yet, just as conditions turn favourable, a new class of capital heavy competitors is stepping in.

Apart from Adani, the JSW Group and Reliance Industries Ltd have also disclosed their intent to manufacture turbines. These are conglomerates that can absorb early losses, compress supply chains and tolerate long gestation periods.“This industry has a very long memory,” says Girish Tanti, vice chairman of Suzlon. “Wind is not forgiving if you cut corners.

It always comes back to performance over 20 years. You cannot hide mistakes in this business.”That sense of memory—corporate, technological and financial—runs through Suzlon’s present strategy. Unlike newer entrants, the company has lived through both exuberance and near extinction.