HYderabad, April 02: The Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) has announced that it has achieved financial closure to pave the way for its 1,200 MW thermal power plant at Jaipur in Adilabad district at an estimated Rs. 6,000 crore.
The Power Finance Corporation (PFC) will provide a debt of Rs. 4,000 crore (70 per cent of the project cost) at 10.5 per cent interest while the remaining 30 per cent would be equity participation by SCCL which would be raised from its internal resources. The company had a cash reserve of Rs. 1,000 crore last year, its chairman and managing director S. Narsing Rao told media persons during an informal interaction here on Friday. Mr. Rao said the company proposed to go it alone in implementation of the project without any joint venture or special purpose vehicle. The project was expected to go on stream by April 2014.
He said that company had signed a draft power purchase agreement with the distribution companies of Transco with an indicative price of Rs. 2.82 a unit. While 1,050 MW of the outage would be sold to Transco, the remaining 150 MW was meant to be captive generation by SCCL.
The company would use two abandoned underground coal mines at Ramakrishnapur in Adilabad to meet the fuel needs of the plant. About 170 million tonnes of left over coal in these mines would be extracted by opencast method. An agreement with BHEL for erection of equipment was going on.
Addressing the annual press conference earlier, Mr. Rao said the company could not afford any more coal linkages with thermal power plants as it had a negative coal balance of 13 million tonnes. So far, it had linkages to the tune of 6 million tonnes.
Mr. Rao said that the coal production in the year was 51.33 million tonnes against a target of 50.5 million tonnes.
The company crossed coal despatches of 50 million tonnes for the first time this year. Its net profit, however, was expected to go down from Rs. 368 crore last year to Rs. 320 crore on account of escalation in cost of production.
–Agencies