Hyderabad: In a major capacity addition, the state will get 25 million units of additional power every day from the 1,200 MW (2x600 MW) thermal power plants of the Singareni Collieries Company Limited in Adilabad district from the end of May.
While the first unit was synchronised in March, the second unit will be done on May 10 and commercial operations will start from May 30. This power will be relatively inexpensive, at Rs 4.20 paise per unit against Rs 6 per unit being purchased by TS power utilities from private power producers.
Power consumption has touched 150 MU in March and is expected to go up to 180 MU per day in peak summer, and even more once the nine-hour day-time power supply commences for the agriculture sector.
Singareni Collieries will set up the third unit of the thermal power plant later. With stricter green norms in place, and the Centre permitting only more environmental friendly supercritical thermal power plants, the capacity of the new unit will be decided by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
As per government of India norms, Singareni Collieries can either build a 660 MW or 800 MW super critical thermal plant.
"This is the first time that Singareni Collieries has ventured into a field other than coal mining. We hope to get around Rs 3,000 crore revenue through the sale of power,” Singareni Collieries chairman and managing director N. Sridhar said. He said Telangana state power utilities owe SCCL about Rs 2,000 crore towards coal supply and they were in the process of paying it.
25 new mines planned
The Singareni Collieries Company Limited will invest '20,000 crore in the next five years and open 25 new mines.
Singareni is a major taxpayer to the state and Central governments and has made 5,000 recruitments this financial year. It plans to increase recruitments during the 2016-17 financial year, as human resources would be needed for new mines.
The company has paid Rs 2,151 crore to the TS government towards royalty and VAT and Rs 2,500 crore to the Central government towards clean energy, IT and corporate taxes in the 2015-16 financial year.
Company CMD N. Sridhar said that SCCL has broken all records in its 127-year history in production of coal, despatch and made a profit of Rs 1,020 crore in 2015-16 fiscal as against Rs 490 crore during the previous financial year. There is a 17 per cent growth in turnover at Rs 16,516 crore against Rs 14,000-odd crore in the previous fiscal.
“As per the vision of the Chief Minister, SCCL will enhance its production, performance, quality of coal and profits in the current fiscal i.e. 2016-17 financial year. Of the 25 new mines, eight would be opened in the current fiscal. Our target is to achieve 100 million tonnes of coal production per year in the next five years,” Mr Sridhar said.
“We have achieved 60.3 million tonnes of coal production, which is 15 per cent growth over last year and highest ever growth in 127 years of SSCL history,” the SCCL CMD said.
