Wind Energy in India: How Fast the Sector Is Growing, and How It Compares Globally

Wind is the oldest of India’s modern renewable industries and, for most of the last decade, the slower-moving one. That has changed. Annual wind additions have risen in each of the last four financial years, the resource base has been reassessed upward as turbines have grown taller, and wind’s generation profile has become the reason it is being written into firm-supply tenders rather than treated as an intermittent add-on. This piece sets out how fast the sector is actually growing, how that growth sits against the global wind market, and where the next phase is expected to come from.

How much wind power capacity does India have?

India’s installed wind capacity was 58,136.89 MW — 58.1 GW — as on 31 July 2026, on the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s monthly progress data. That is roughly a fifth of India’s 291.7 GW of installed renewable capacity including large hydro, and about a tenth of the country’s total installed generation capacity of approximately 552 GW.

Output has moved with it. Wind plants generated 106.089 billion units in FY2025-26, growth of more than a quarter on the previous year, against total generation of approximately 1,840 billion units. A further 28 GW of wind capacity was under implementation as of June 2026.

How fast is wind energy in India growing?

Faster each year for four years. India’s annual wind capacity additions have risen in every financial year since FY2022-23, and FY2025-26 was the strongest on record at 6.05 GW — approximately 46% above the previous record of 4.15 GW set in FY2024-25.

Source: Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, reply to Lok Sabha Starred Question No. 157, 29 July 2026. Figures rounded from MNRE’s published MW values.

The longer arc is steeper still. India had 21.0 GW of wind capacity in March 2014 and 56.1 GW in March 2026 — a 2.66-fold increase. The current financial year has opened in the same direction, with capacity moving from 56.1 GW at the end of March 2026 to 58.1 GW by the end of July. Our earlier analysis of India’s wind revival looked at what turned the auction market around; the capacity data now confirms it was not a one-year effect.

How does India’s growth compare with the global wind market?

2025 was a record year for wind worldwide. The Global Wind Energy Council reports 165 GW of new capacity installed globally, a 40% increase on 2024 and the largest annual rise the industry has recorded. Cumulative global wind capacity reached 1,299 GW, spread across 138 countries, with 28,395 turbines commissioned in 57 markets during the year. Onshore accounted for 155.3 GW of the new capacity and offshore for 9.3 GW.

That growth is highly concentrated. China installed 120.5 GW in 2025 — more than the rest of the world combined — followed by the United States at 6.9 GW, India at 6.3 GW, Germany at 5.7 GW and Brazil at 2.3 GW. Those five markets accounted for 86% of everything built that year.

Note on basis: India’s national figures are MNRE’s, reported on financial years to 31 March. Global figures are GWEC’s, reported on calendar years to 31 December. The calendar-2025 addition of 6.3 GW is GWEC’s, used here so both sides of the comparison cover the same period; India’s own record of 6.05 GW is the financial year to 31 March 2026. Cumulative totals in the two series are measured on different dates and are not directly comparable.

Two further global markers are worth holding alongside the Indian picture. Wind supplied 8.5% of global electricity in 2025, and renewables as a whole reached 33.8% of world generation, overtaking coal for the first time in 100 years, on Ember’s accounting. And costs have kept falling: IRENA’s global weighted-average levelised cost for newly commissioned onshore wind was USD 33 per MWh in 2025, at a global weighted-average installed cost of USD 976 per kW. Those are worldwide averages across every project commissioned that year — not a tariff, and not an Indian number — but they explain why wind has stayed investable through a period of supply-chain and policy turbulence in several Western markets.

The forward view is expansionary but not unlimited. GWEC forecasts 969 GW of new wind capacity between 2026 and 2030, averaging around 194 GW a year, with cumulative capacity passing 2 TW by 2029. The International Energy Agency expects global wind capacity to nearly double to more than 2,000 GW by 2030, while noting that renewable capacity overall is on course to reach about 2.6 times its 2022 level by that date — short of the tripling pledged at COP28. India’s trajectory is one of the parts of that global picture that is currently running ahead of expectation rather than behind it.

Which are the wind energy states in India?

Wind in India is a story about eight states. Gujarat holds the largest installed fleet, followed by Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and those eight states together account for more than 99% of national capacity. The same eight states hold 1,136.7 GW of the country’s 1,163.9 GW of assessed onshore potential — 97.7% of it.

Sources: installed capacity — MNRE reply to Lok Sabha Starred Question No. 157, 29 July 2026. Potential — National Institute of Wind Energy, Wind Potential Atlas at 150 m above ground level, 2023.

Read the two columns together and the shape of the next decade becomes visible. Rajasthan holds the largest assessed resource in the country at 284.3 GW and ranks fifth by capacity built, which leaves substantial headroom as transmission corridors and hybrid tenders open up. Maharashtra and Karnataka show a similar pattern. The concentration in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu reflects where the industry started and where evacuation infrastructure matured first; the resource assessment says the growth corridors are wider than the current map. Site selection has become correspondingly more data-led — the National Institute of Wind Energy now runs a network of more than 900 wind-monitoring stations and publishes a national wind-solar hybrid resource map for developers.

How much onshore wind in India is still untapped?

About 95% of it, on the current assessment. India’s onshore wind potential is put at 1,163.9 GW at a 150-metre hub height, against 58.1 GW installed. Within that total, NIWE identifies 164 GW of high-quality resource capable of capacity utilisation above 35%.

The potential figure has tripled in eight years, and it is important to understand why. NIWE assessed 302 GW at 100 metres in 2015, 695.5 GW at 120 metres in 2019 and 1,163.9 GW at 150 metres in 2023. This is the same wind, measured higher up the tower. As turbines have grown, resource that was previously uneconomic has come into range: MNRE records the largest machine now available in India at 5.2 MW, against typical unit sizes of 2 to 3 MW a few years ago, with rotor diameters above 140 metres and hub heights up to 160 metres increasingly common. Land classification matters too — the 150-metre assessment attributes roughly 544 GW of the potential to wasteland and about 607 GW to cultivable land, which is why land aggregation remains one of the sector’s genuine execution constraints.

A separate pool sits inside the existing fleet. MNRE puts India’s repowering potential at around 25.4 GW, counting installed wind turbines below 2 MW — much of it at sites that were developed early precisely because the wind resource there is strong. The National Repowering and Life Extension Policy for Wind Power Projects, 2023 provides the framework for replacing or upgrading those machines. We will cover repowering India’s older wind fleet in detail separately; for the purposes of the growth picture, the point is that a meaningful share of future capacity can be added on land already secured and already connected.

Where does offshore wind stand?

India has no commissioned offshore wind capacity, and the near-term growth in wind power in India will be onshore. The policy and funding architecture is nonetheless in place. The National Offshore Wind Energy Policy of 2015 makes MNRE the nodal ministry and NIWE the nodal agency for seabed surveys and bid management, and in June 2024 the Union Cabinet approved a viability gap funding scheme of ₹7,453 crore — ₹6,853 crore of VGF for 1,000 MW of projects, split evenly between zones off Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, and ₹600 crore to upgrade two ports for offshore logistics.

Activation is being sequenced deliberately. SECI closed two earlier tenders totalling 4.5 GW in August 2025 after bid deadlines were extended without sufficient developer interest, reflecting cost and supply-chain conditions in the global offshore market, and MNRE has indicated it is re-evaluating the timing of the VGF-backed 1 GW tender rather than issuing it into a global offshore market that has itself contracted — the IEA revised its own global offshore forecast down by more than a quarter in 2025. Offshore remains a real part of India’s long-term wind story. It is not part of the current growth curve.

Why is wind central to firm green power in India?

Because of when it generates. MNRE’s own assessment is that nearly 45% of wind generation in India occurs during peak demand hours. Wind also runs counter-seasonally to solar: output rises through the south-west monsoon between June and September, precisely when cloud cover suppresses solar generation. June 2026 illustrates the effect — wind produced 15.256 billion units in that single month, close to a seventh of its entire output for the preceding financial year.

That profile is why wind has moved from the periphery of procurement design to its centre. Firm supply products now specify delivery obligations rather than annual volumes: SECI’s 2026 round of firm and dispatchable renewable energy contracts required at least 90% delivery during peak hours under 25-year agreements. Meeting that specification economically means combining resources, which is the logic behind wind-solar hybrid projects and behind the storage now being contracted alongside them. It is also why the Renewable Consumption Obligation framework notified by the Ministry of Power in September 2025, which supersedes the earlier renewable purchase obligation trajectory and rises to 43.33% by FY2029-30, is increasingly met with portfolios rather than single technologies.

What is driving the next phase of growth?

Three things: stated targets, manufacturing depth, and turbine technology.

• Targets. The government has stated goals of 100 GW of wind capacity by 2030 and 156 GW by 2036. The Central Electricity Authority’s own planning work points the same way, modelling roughly 99.9 GW of wind in the optimal generation mix for 2029-30 and about 155 GW by 2035-36. GWEC’s independent industry forecast, published in August 2025, projects 107 GW by 2030.
• Manufacturing. India’s domestic wind turbine manufacturing capacity reached approximately 24 GW a year as of March 2026, up from about 10 GW in 2014, on MNRE’s Global Wind Day 2026 assessment, with indigenisation levels of 70-80% and around 14 manufacturers operating in the country. GWEC ranks India the third largest wind equipment manufacturing hub in the world.
• Technology. Larger machines on taller towers are what converted the resource reassessment into buildable projects, and they are also what makes repowering economic at legacy sites. The approved-list framework governing which turbine models and components may be deployed has been reorganised under ALMM for wind, extending listing requirements to major components.

Also Read: Solar and Battery Storage: How It Works and How to Choose the Right System

Where do independent power producers fit in India’s wind growth?

Most of India’s renewable capacity is built by private developers, and wind’s growth curve is largely their delivery record. The pattern visible in current portfolios is that wind is rarely being built alone — it is being contracted as part of hybrid and firm-supply projects designed to meet delivery obligations across the day.

Resolven is an example of that shift. Wind and battery storage account for more than 20% of its portfolio, and its published utility-scale wind, solar, hybrid and storage projects pair wind with solar and storage at sites in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In April 2026 the company signed a 25-year power supply agreement with SECI for a 180 MW wind project in Andhra Pradesh, and in July 2026 it secured 200 MW in SECI’s 2 GW inter-state wind auction. In August 2025, ahead of the rebranding, it ordered 381 MW of Suzlon S144 turbines — 127 machines across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu — for its first firm and dispatchable renewable energy project.

Parag Sharma, Board Member and Chief Executive Officer of Resolven, described the company’s stated intent at its rebranding in February 2026: “a high-stakes two years in which we aim to execute more than 1.5 GW of projects annually across solar, wind, hybrid and battery storage, simultaneously, across multiple states.”

That is the shape of the sector’s next phase in miniature. India’s wind fleet grew for two decades as a standalone technology. It is now growing as a component of firm, contracted supply — bridging today’s energy needs with tomorrow’s clean solutions, and aligning growth, sustainability and energy security in the transition era.

Frequently asked questions

How much wind power capacity does India have?

India had 58.1 GW of installed wind capacity as on 31 July 2026, according to MNRE. That is the fourth largest wind fleet in the world and around 20% of India’s installed renewable energy capacity including large hydro.

Which state has the most “wind energy in India”?

Gujarat, with 16.1 GW installed as at 30 June 2026, ahead of Tamil Nadu at 12.3 GW and Karnataka at 8.9 GW. Rajasthan holds the largest assessed potential — 284.3 GW at a 150-metre hub height — but ranks fifth by capacity built.

Does India have offshore wind farms?

No offshore wind capacity has been commissioned in India to date. A viability gap funding scheme of ₹7,453 crore was approved in June 2024 to support an initial 1,000 MW off Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, and MNRE has been assessing the timing of that tender. All of India’s 58.1 GW is onshore.

How does “wind power in India” compare with solar?

Solar generates more electricity — 174.8 billion units against wind’s 106.1 billion units in FY2025-26 — but the two run on different clocks. Wind peaks during the monsoon and through the evening and night, when solar output falls away, which is why the two are increasingly contracted together. For a business reader, the benefits of wind power for businesses are covered separately.