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The GMR Group’s 220 MW barge-mounted power plant, which currently lies anchored on the coast of Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, is set to float off — again.
The country’s only barge-mounted plant was moved from its first location Tanir Bavi near Mangaluru to Kakinada in 2010. The plant has been lying shut for want of feedstock, natural gas.
A spokesman of the GMR Group told BusinessLine recently that the group was in talks with three companies. One of them will buy the plant and relocate it to (presumably) another developed country. The spokesman mentioned Indonesia as one possibility. (Incidentally, the group’s 200 MW Basin Bridge power plant in Chennai, which has completed its 15-year power purchase agreement period with Tamil Nadu’s electricity distribution company, is also ready to be dismantled and sold off.)
Tie up with US firmA September 2015 report of the rating agency, ICRA, notes that after the plant was brought from Mangaluru to Kakinada, the group spent ₹605 crore, in 2011-12, to make it run on natural gas. In 2012-13, it made a net loss of ₹496.84 crore.
When it was commissioned in 2001 in a joint venture between the US power company, PSEG and the GMR Group, the 15,325-tonne, Hyundai-built floating plant, first anchored in the Gurupura estuary, seemed good. A 106-metre long, 55-metre wide, 6 metre thick barge, half its thickness underwater, was a novel idea. On it stood four GE-made turbines and one ABB steam generator.
Financial crisisBut, within a year, it ran into trouble. In June 2002, The Hindu reported that the plant was facing a financial crisis because the buyer of the power, Karnataka Power Transmission Company, was defaulting on payments.
The next few years saw PSEG exiting India leaving the baby in the hands of the Indian partner. With naphtha prices going up, the power it produced was costly, and eventually, the group decided to move it to Kakinada — where, it was then expected, natural gas will be available aplenty from Reliance’s newly-discovered D-6 gas field. The gas never came.
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