Risk Mitigation in Public Infrastructure Projects

January 2017. An electrical engineer turned bureaucrat sits in his office, waiting for numbers that will decide whether an audacious bet pays off.

The mission: build India’s largest single-site solar power project on a barren plateau in Madhya Pradesh — without the subsidy every other solar project in the country depends on to survive.

Conventional wisdom says it can’t be done. Solar power costs more than coal. Cash-strapped state utilities won’t buy renewable energy without financial cover. The standard playbook — hand it to a central agency, take the safety of government subsidy, keep the tariff manageable — is right there, waiting to be followed.

Instead, one officer chooses to walk away from the safety net entirely, betting that a smarter auction design, the right international partners, and an unconventional customer nobody thought to court could bring the price down further than any subsidy ever had.

Land has to be found without displacing a single farmer. Global lenders have to be convinced to bank on an untested model. A metro system hundreds of kilometres away has to be persuaded into an energy-sharing arrangement no one in India had tried before.

Every piece has to fall into place and if even one doesn’t, the entire wager collapses.

Can ambition, structure, and a refusal to take the easy route rewrite the economics of solar power in India?