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BHEL has emerged the best bidder for a ₹19,422-crore turnkey contract for building a thermal power plant for NLC India at Talabira, Odisha, quoting a better price than L&T-MHI, a highly placed official told businessline. The financial bids were opened on Friday.
BHEL will build three ultra supercritical units of 800 MW each for NLC India at Talabira. Incidentally, NLC has added a fourth unit of 800 MW to the project. The EPC tender was for the first three projects; it is not clear whether or not there would be a separate tender for the fourth unit.
(An ultra-supercritical thermal plant is one in which the temperature and pressure of the steam generated are very high, roughly 600 degrees C and 240 bar. Such plants are more efficient — they produce more power per unit of fuel.)
This is a big order for BHEL, which will load its plants at Tiruchi (boilers), Haridwar (turbine-generator) and Hyderabad (various other components such as pulveriser mills).
The power plant will be fed with coal from NLC’s Talabira mines. NLC will produce 14.5 million tonnes of coal from Talabira this year, but has plans to raise production to 20 million tonnes in a few years.
A job of this size will take about five years to complete, experts in the field said. The project was first designed to be put up at Sirkazhi in Tamil Nadu but was later shifted to Talabira in order to save the cost of transporting coal from Talabira mines to down south.
As of September-end 2023, NLC India had 3.6 GW of thermal power capacity and 1.4 GW of renewable energy and mining capacity of 50 million tonnes of lignite and coal. It has won two solar projects through competitive bidding processes — 600 MW in Gujarat and 800 MW in Rajasthan. The company has plans to increase electricity generation capacity to 17 GW by 2030.
In the quarter ended September, NLC India achieved a turnover of ₹2,744 crore on which it made a net profit of ₹1,121 crore (PAT margin of 40.87 per cent). On Friday on the BSE, the NLC share (of ₹10 face value) closed at ₹253.35.
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