industry

Government to auction power transmission contracts worth Rs 8,000 crore soon


NEW DELHI: The government will soon auction power transmission contracts worth over Rs 8,000 crore connecting renewable energy projects in western and northern states while it has deferred a decision on lines worth Rs 5,500 crore.

Minutes of a meeting of National Committee on Transmission (NCT) held on December 4 showed that contracts worth about Rs 3,500 crore have been awarded on nomination basis to Power Grid Corp (PGCIL). Private sector firms such as Tata Power, Adani Power Transmission, L&T Infra, Torrent Power, Kalpataru Power Transmission and Megha Engineering had earlier bid for such contracts.

The government has also compressed the timeline for implementing the projects to 18 months while setting September 2020 as the target completion date for some projects.

Power transmission companies have welcomed the move but have demanded the government to half the auction timeline from the planned 140 days to 70 days. The companies have also said the government can auction transmission lines instead of deferring them and a green signal can be given later to the selected company to match the schedule of generation projects.

“The transmission sector has made great progress by the government’s commitment to competition,” said Ved Tiwari, CEO of global infra business at Sterlite Power. “The government just needs to address two things—compressing the bid timelines and planning the projects in time, as is done in other sectors like highways and renewable energy projects. If the projects can be targeted to be implemented in 18 months, there is no reason why auction process shall take five months. Also, the government can plan and bid out the transmission projects and serve a notice to proceed when the generation projects are getting ready.”

The committee deferred the Rs 5,500-crore contracts due to lack of clarity on the status of the renewable energy generation plants. Electric Power Transmission Association has asked for auction of these projects. “We note that the decision on transmission projects worth Rs 5,525 crore have been deferred by the NCT citing a lack of stage-II LTA connectivity application from RE projects. This could potentially create an avoidable urgency situation in the upcoming months, defeating the very purpose of planning these schemes in the first place. We urge the empowered committee to consider implementation of these schemes instead of deferment,” it told ET.

“We strongly reiterate that the bidding timeline of five months for tariff-based competitive bidding projects can easily be crashed to about 70 days (about two-and-a-half) by following a single-stage, two-envelope process that is already being practised for selection of renewable energy developers by SECI, and also has been notified by the power ministry under the gazette notification dated April 17, 2006,” it said.





READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.