Tata Power plans to invest around Rs 1,000 crore over the next three years for laying its own cable network in the metropolis for distributing power, said a senior company official.
“We will be investing around Rs 1,000 crore over the next three years to lay our own distribution network in Mumbai for supplying power to our customers,” TPC Executive Director Mr Sankaranarayanan Padmanabhan told reporters late yesterday after the company’s AGM.
At present, TPC serves 8 lakh customers using the wire network of BEST and Reliance Infrastructure to distribute electricity in the city and the suburbs, respectively. TPC also has its own network in certain parts of the metropolis.
TPC is charged a fee, called wheeling charges for using distributing power through the RelInfra and BEST network, which the company then recovers from its consumers.
“Law allows wheeling and permits us to use the network of Reliance to distribute electricity in the suburbs. Before the Supreme Court order, we were not allowed to lay parallel network. But now we have rolled out a plan to lay our own network. We have put up a proposal to the MERC,” he said.
Meanwhile, in a recent order of the state electricity regulator, the regulator MERC had granted RInfra licence to distribute electricity in the suburbs for 25 years as the company’s licence was expiring on August 15.
The MERC had rejected the proposals of four other bidders, including Torrent Power, Lanco Infrastructure, MSEDCL and Indiabulls, saying they did not have their own networks in place and in “public interest” it granted Rinfra the licence.