The Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has once again extended the bid submission deadline for setting up of 10 GW of ISTS connected solar PV power projects linked with 3 GW (per annum) solar manufacturing capacity.

The new bid submission deadline is November 12, 2018 and techno-commercial bid will open on November 13, 2018.

Mercom reported previously that the first bid submission deadline was extended from August 27, 2018 to September 27, 2018 and again to October 12, 2018.

When Mercom contacted a SECI official, he chose not to clarify about the reason for yet another extension.

This is the fourth bid submission deadline given by SECI since the tender was floated in May 2018. Initially, the tender was for setting up 5 GW of manufacturing capacity across the country. The manufacturing capacity was to be linked to ISTS-connected solar projects for an aggregate capacity of 10 GW.

However, recently, SECI announced that it has decided to reduce the capacity of the manufacturing tender from 5 GW to 3 GW. The minimum capacity developers can bid for manufacturing has also been reduced from 1 GW to 600 MW.

The goal of the tender is to strengthen the domestic solar supply chain by incentivizing domestic manufacturing capacity establishment by awarding PPAs to build projects.

In the recent months, SECI has extended bid submission deadline multiple times of various tenders.

It recently extended the bid submission deadline for setting up 150 MW (50 MW x 3) of grid connected floating solar power projects at Rihand Dam (also known as Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar Reservoir), located in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh to October 25, 2018. Previously, Mercom had reported that SECI extended the bid submission deadline to September 28, 2018 from the earlier deadline of May 31.

SECI has also extended the bid submission deadline for 160 MW of solar-wind hybrid power project with battery energy storage system (BESS) at Ramagiri, located in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. The new deadline is October 17, 2018.