Singareni plans 600 mw power plant

Coming up in Adilabad district, the plant involves an investment of Rs 3,000 crore.

State-owned Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) is planning to set up a 600Mw merchant power plant in the Jaipur mandal of Adilabad district at an investment of Rs 3,000 crore, according to its chairman and managing director S Narsing Rao.

“We are expecting the approvals from the Government of India by March. The tender process would be completed soon after that and the project would be ready by 2012,” he told the media. While the company would raise 30 per cent from internal accruals, the remaining would be met through institutional lenders.

Giving an overview of the company’s performance, he said SCCL produced 32.65 million tonne coal during the nine-month ended December 31, 2008, as against the target of 30.67 million tonne, the best-ever in its 120-year history. It expects to produce another 43.6 million tonne in the remaining three months to surpass the production target (42. 5 million tonne) for the sixth consecutive year after its turnaround in 2002-03. For the year 2009-10, the company is eyeing 50.4 million tonne coal production.

The Rs 6,500-crore company during the year opened two new open cast projects -Koyagudem OC II and Kakatiyakhani OC in Khamman and Warangal respectively – and an underground project in Karimnagar. It acquired two plants of SMS Explosives from IBP at Godavarikhani and Manuguru in the state.

Though the company has not been directly hit by the slowdown, the reduced demand for coal from paper, cement, ferro alloys, sponge iron industries has impacted the revenues. In November, SCCL earned Rs 20 crore less revenue from the e-auction platform. “We have set a target of Rs 360 crore revenues only from for the e-auction platform for the full year but going by the trend, which is likely to prevail for the next three months, we may not achieve the target,” Rao said.

The company is targeting an overall revenue of Rs 6,200 crore for the financial year 2008-09, of which it has already achieved Rs 4,650 crore during the nine-month period ended December 31.

About 75 per cent of the coal produced by the company is used by the power sector. SCCL supplied 1.6 million tonne more coal than the fuel supply agreement of 7.16 million tonne to the state-owned power generator APGenco and the Ramagundam unit of National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) this year.

The company has made a contingency plan for supplying one million tonne coal to APGenco and 600 Mw Bhupalapalli Power House from March 2009 by converting one of its underground mine into an open cast mine in the Bhupalapalli area.