NEW DELHI: For an energy investor the interesting thing about India’s first two geothermal wells is not that they exist. It is that they convert a geological presumption into a measurement, and measurement is what a project finance model runs on.
ONGC Energy Centre commissioned two 1,000-metre wells at Puga Valley in Ladakh on 17 July 2026. Project engineers recorded a maximum temperature of 135°C at 400 metres. Testing continues. The wells are the input to reservoir evaluation, and the evaluation decides whether the proposed 1 MW pilot — which would be India’s first demonstration-scale geothermal power project — is financeable.
Why a firm renewable is priced differently
Solar and wind are cheap and intermittent, and the cost of that intermittency has migrated from the generator’s balance sheet to the grid’s, where it appears as storage, as balancing capacity and as curtailment. Geothermal is neither cheap nor intermittent. It runs at a steady output through the night, through still air and through the monsoon. For a system that has added renewable capacity faster than it has added flexibility, the value of a firm renewable is not its levelised cost but the balancing cost it removes. India has, until now, had no operating example to price.
The commercial figures are not on the record. Neither the capital cost of the two wells, nor the projected tariff, nor the reservoir’s estimated sustainable draw appears on the Administration’s page, and none is printed here. Anyone modelling this project is modelling it on the temperature and the depth, and should say so.
The operational number, derived here
One figure is available and it is worth having, because it is the closest thing on the record to a cost proxy. The second well was spudded on 3 June 2026 and completed to 1,000 metres on 8 July 2026. That is 35 days, and 28.6 metres a day — this desk’s arithmetic from the two dates the Administration prints. Rig-days are the dominant variable cost in any drilling programme, and at 4,267 metres of altitude, with a working season that closes with the weather, a 35-day well is the difference between a pilot and a stranded hole. The first well had reached target depth on 22 May 2026. Two wells inside one season is the operational fact underneath the ceremonial one.
The Administration’s account also records why the season nearly did not happen: the tripartite memorandum between the Ladakh Administration, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh, and ONGC Energy Centre had expired, costing several months, and was renewed for five years in June 2026 following the Lieutenant Governor’s intervention. For an investor that is the material disclosure on this asset — the counterparty structure is a three-way instrument with a term, and it has lapsed once. It now runs to 2031.
Credit is plainly earned by the drilling crew of ONGC Energy Centre, whose second well was finished in 35 days at altitude, and by the office of the Lieutenant Governor, Shri V. K. Saxena, for restoring the instrument the work depended on.