India To Spend $18 Billion On Preventing Another Massive Blackout
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The Power Grid Corp. of India, the largest state-owned electric utilities company in the country, is set to spend more than 1 trillion rupees ($18 billion) to upgrade its electricity networks, reported Bloomberg News on Monday, in order to avoid a repeat of the July 30-31 blackouts, which left more half of the nation’s 1.2 billion population without power.
The Power Grid Corp. of India, the largest state-owned electric utilities company in the country, is set to spend more than 1 trillion rupees ($18 billion) to upgrade its electricity networks, reported Bloomberg News on Monday, in order to avoid a repeat of the July 30-31 blackouts, which left more half of the nation’s 1.2 billion population without power.
“Making sure a collapse doesn’t happen again is our top priority,” said Power Grid Chairman R.N. Nayak in an interview on September 14.
“We may end up crossing that 1 trillion-rupee spending mark to strengthen and stabilize the gaps exposed by the blackouts,” he added.
The company, which produces up to 50 percent of the nation’s total electricity, said that it would be doubling its expenditure through the next five years in order to complete several projects related to its power network.
According to Power Grid’s director of operations R.P. Sasmal, the company has already approved projects worth 800 billion rupees and plans to raise at least 700 billion rupees in debt over the next five years.
[quote]“We have stepped up our efforts to increase connectivity. What some companies plan to spend in five years, we are spending that in one month,” he said.[/quote]About a third of the company’s debt has already come from local and foreign lenders, Samsal added, and another 40 billion rupees will be raised through a bond sale later this month. Power Grid hopes that it can boost its market share from 50 percent to 70 percent by the time all the projects are completed.
“We expect all our projects to be implemented on schedule, first of which will be up and running next year,” said Sasmal. “The government is backing all of them as it’s critical for achieving self-sufficiency in power.”
Still, analyst Abhishek Patel, with Mumbai- based ITI Securities Ltd, warned that Power Grid could fail to meet its spending targets if India’s power generators fail to meet Prime Minister’s targets of providing an additional 76,000 megawatts of electricity by 2017.
[quote]“Power generators are facing a lot of headwinds, from lack of coal supply both locally and from abroad, financing challenges and land clearance delays,” Patel said in an interview. “Assuming generators fall short of their capacity target by about 20 gigawatts, we’re estimating that Power Grid will fail to reach its spending target.”[/quote]Related: 360 Million Indians Hit By ‘Worst Blackout In Decade’
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India has missed every annual target to add electricity production capacity since 1951, resulting in a peak demand deficit of nearly 10 percent. Though power cuts are fairly common across the country, the ones experienced in late July were the worst the nation has ever suffered, leaving many commuters stranded as transportation systems were forced to shut down.
