Bankrupt SunEdison still looks for growth in India: report

SunEdison Inc, the renewable energy company that filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday after after going bust with a $3.1-billion acquisition, still hopes to push its India growth plans on acquired or borrowed funds.

The US clean-power giant filed its bankruptcy plea in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, listing $16.1 billion of debt under Chapter 11, making it the biggest US bankruptcy in more than a year.

SunEdison's woes are more due to the torrid pace of expansion and the uneven business model that allowed spinning off of projects as separate businesses, say analysts.

The Maryland Heights, Missouri-based clean energy major, however, vowed to press ahead with plans to build solar projects in India, tapping equity partnerships to do so.

The company's business model - building clean-energy plants and then spinning them off to publicly-held companies it controls - may well work for India under the public-private partnership model under which most state governments award clean energy projects.

Also, two of its best known companies, TerraForm Power Inc and TerraForm Global Inc, are not part of the bankruptcy, although SunEdison acknowledged responsibility for some of their debt in court papers.

''Everyone in India has been partnering for equity,'' SunEdison Asia-Pacific president Pashupathy Gopalan said in an interview. ''We didn't do that in the past, so now we have to do that. We have to learn from our peers and do what others have already done.''

SunEdison has in its pipeline 1.7-gigawatt of projects in India that it plans to develop and build in the next two years, and of this, 550 megawatts of projects are under construction, Gopalan said.

''The Indian business will continue on its normal course,'' Gopalan said. ''We will continue to build and develop and take our India business forward.''

India had 5.25 gigawatts of installed solar capacity as of the end of January, as per data available with the ministry of new and renewable energy and with a target of 100GW clean power by 2022, the Narendra Modi government need to more projects to meet the target.

SunEdison has ventured into new geographical areas and new technologies in its pursuit of growth and invested vast amounts of borrowed money.

SunEdison also ruffled India's solar market through its bidding on solar projects after the company took all 500 megawatts of capacity offered in a November auction in Andhra Pradesh, offering to sell power at Rs4.63 (7 cents) a kilowatt-hour, a record low.

Reuters quoted Gopalan as saying that SunEdison had excluded India - its largest market outside the United States - from its bankruptcy process. As a result, it planned to keep growing in the country.

With 1.7-gigawatt of projects in the pipeline, India accounts for a fifth of SunEdison's total business.

"Nothing really has changed other than that we will look for equity partners in our India projects and India business," Gopalan said by telephone from the United States.

The news follows earlier reports that the company is in talks to sell stakes in the planned projects with the Adani Group and Finland's Fortum.