South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Company Ltd plans to set up a power equipment manufacturing unit near Chennai, the Power Minister, Mr Sushilkumar Shinde, said here on Tuesday. The plant is proposed to be set up through the 100 per cent foreign direct investment route, he said.

“They (Doosan officials) have met me twice. The talks are at a preliminary stage,” Mr Shinde said at the sidelines of an industry conference. The annual capacity of the facility is likely to be around 3,000 MW.

In January this year, Doosan had signed a pact with creditors of Austria's AE&E group to acquire its India-based boiler manufacturing unit for €20.5 million to strengthen its presence in the Indian power generation market.

Growing presence

Doosan has been securing orders in India, starting with the supercritical boiler for NTPC's Sipat project (3x660 MW) way back in 2004. Three years later, Doosan bagged Tata Power's order to supply five supercritical boilers of 800 MW each, and followed that up with an equipment order from GMR Energy for the latter's Raipur-Chhattisgarh thermal project.

State-owned BHEL is the country's biggest power equipment manufacturer, with an annual capacity to produce equipment corresponding to a generation capacity of 15,000 MW per annum. This is being further scaled up to 20,000 MW per annum by March 2012.

In the private sector, the only player currently is the joint venture of Larsen & Toubro and Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, with a manufacturing facility at Hazira, in Gujarat. This plant has the capacity to produce boilers and turbine generators with a capacity of 4,000 MW per annum.

Upcoming ventures

Alstom and Bharat Forge have a JV company, under which it is setting up a plant at Mundra in Gujarat.

Besides, a joint venture between Toshiba and JSW is on the anvil, which would produce turbine generators totalling 3,000 MW capacity every year.

A Gammon-Ansaldo joint venture is also setting up a boiler manufacturing plant in Tamil Nadu, which would be operational by December next year. Another boiler manufacturing facility is being set up by Thermax-Babcock & Wilcox with a capacity of 3,000 MW.

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