December 02, 2008

Shanghai Electric eying Indian power sector

BS reported that Chinese power equipment manufacturer Shanghai Electric Company is in the race to supply power generating equipments to Mahagenco.

A senior official from the energy ministry said that “We will be giving the contract for the power plant only on the basis of competitive bidding whether it is BHEL, Shanghai Electric or any other company. However, we wanted to ascertain if the Shanghai Electrical’s designs for the power plants are radically different from those used by Mahagenco and the availability of spare parts over the next 20 to 25 years.”

The official added that besides, the energy ministry has taken the decision to go for 800MW super critical thermal power plants as they save both the commissioning time and they are more fuel efficient and also brings international competition into the bidding. With a large gap in the demand and supply the 800MW plants allow us to take a big jump in meeting the demand and besides it uses 6% to 7% less coal than two plants of 400MW.

Maharashtra, which faced a power shortfall of around 5,000MW last summer, is not happy with the delays by BHEL as its projects of around 2,000MW have been delayed by 6 months to 9 months because of the delays on the part of BHEL. However, it could do little to overcome the problem as BHEL offers the lowest prices for plant machinery in the 250MW to 500MW plant category. The Mahagenco has plans to add capacity addition of 6,500MW by 2010-11 and out of this, work on 2,000MW has already been started besides the tendering process for the next 2,000MW will begin soon.

A large number of power plants are being planned in India and Shanghai Electric Company is bidding for many of these projects. Shanghai Electric Company hopes to bag some of those and is contemplating starting a service station in India so that solves a major worry on the availability of spare parts to a large extent.