Techno Electric & Engineering Company, which has just put up a 101.4 MW wind farm in Tamil Nadu, says that short term solutions exist to tackle the vexing problem of shortage of transmission infrastructure in southern Tamil Nadu.

According to Mr P.P. Gupta, Managing Director, Techno Electric, it is possible to solve the problem in about six months, well before the next wind season.

Talking to Business Line, Mr Gupta said that the first step is to study where precisely the bottlenecks lie on the existing infrastructure.

For instance, is it necessary to change the ‘conductors’ so that the load carrying capacity goes up. Another area to look at is the transformer capacity.

Further, it would be worthwhile examining which stretches are overloaded, so that the load on those lines could be eased by adding a loop-line.

Techno Electric says it is prepared to do a study and also get it validated by specialist companies. The whole exercise would not cost more than Rs 40 crore, Mr Gupta said.

Of course, the long term solution is to lay a 400 kVa infrastructure, which would also bring down technical line losses. This, Mr Gupta says, could cost about Rs 650 crore.

Techno Electric has told the TNEB, the state-owned utility, that it (Techno Electric) is willing to build the infrastructure on a PPP model. The company, which has done a similar project in Haryana, finds it sensible, not in the least because the state government would not need to spend anything on creating the infrastructure.

Techno Electric would be paid a fee by the State Government. The State Government need only pay what it could afford, because any Techno Electric would get viability gap funding from the Government of India, Mr Gupta said.

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