Gujarat NRE Coke plans power plants

Gujarat NRE Coke plans to set up coke oven flu gas power plants in its production facilities at Bachau in Gujarat and Dharwad in Karnataka. The plans will have a combined capacity of 15Mw.

"We are looking at setting up two power plants in the next 18 months for which we will earmark around Rs 130 crore," said PR Kannan, CFO, Gujarat NRE Coke.

He said the first plant would come up at Dharwad at a cost of Rs 65-70 crore. The power would be used for the company's own requirements and there are no plans to commercialise it. A third plant is also being considered which could need a further investment of Rs 80 crore, he said.

The company's recent announcement of Rs 175 crore investment in the form of 20 windmills of 1,500Kw each at Kutch is expected to generate around 70,000 carbon credits from it for which it is developing a clean development mechanism (CDM) project. This will be in addition to the 55,000 carbon credits it expects to receive from its existing 25Mw wind mill in Kutch which is undergoing the certification process.

The company plans to conduct generation from these windmills in a phased manner. Most of these will start generation by September 2008 taking the combined generation capacity of the company to 57.5Mw from the windmills alone.