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Energy Efficiency Services has appointed Moody’s as the rating agency and Standard Chartered Bank as the arranger for its $100-million green bond issue.
“We are planning to go to the market in January,” Saurabh Kumar, Managing Director, EESL, told BusinessLine .
EESL, collectively owned by four public sector power companies — NTPC, PGCIL, REC and PFC — replaces old electric appliances with new energy-saving devices. Its business model is to replace the equipment first at the customers’ premises and collect the cost and profits over time, out of the savings in energy bills.
As a result, its business is capital intensive. Kumar had earlier said that EESL would need ₹4,000 crore for its current year’s operations, and ₹6,000 crore for the next. Its operations would require ₹80,000 crore in the next five years. As part of its fund-raising programme, the company is tapping into the green bond market abroad.
The company is growing rapidly. Its turnover in 2014-15 was ₹70 crore on which it made a net profit of ₹9 crore. Last year, the numbers were ₹715 crore and ₹40 crore. The performance in the first six months of the current year have exceeded that of the last full year — turnover ₹750 crore and net profit ₹42 crore.
EESL began its innings in January 2015, replacing filament bulbs with LED lamps at customers’ houses, under government of India’s Ujala programme. To date (according to information provided in delp.in , a Web site run by EESL), the company has replaced 17.80 crore bulbs, saving energy worth ₹9,256 crore and avoiding 4,633 MW of peak power.
Earlier this year, the company began exchanging old ceiling fans for the more energy-efficient, five-star rated ones.
And now, EESL has signed an MoU with the government of Andhra Pradesh to replace two lakh agricultural pumpsets with high-efficiency products. Kumar said the company is in the process of finalising procurement arrangements.
MoU with MinistryIn September, EESL signed an MoU with the Ministry of Urban Development for providing water pumps and sewage pumps for 500 districts in India. The project will fall under the Centre’s Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT).
The Ministry, on its part, will sign up with local bodies. (Under the AMRUT scheme, local bodies implement the projects and the Ministry provides the funds.)
“We will invest (on the pumps) at our cost,” Kumar said, adding that the payback would come out of the energy savings.
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