Power Grid investing Rs55,000 crore in capacity expansion

Mumbai: Power Grid Corporation Ltd will invest Rs55,000 crore in the next five years to expand capacity, chairman and managing director S K Chaturvedi told television channel NDTV Profit.

The state-run transmission utility will invest in increasing its inter-regional transmission capacity from 17,000 mega Watt to 37,000 mega Watt, Chaturvedi said.

Power Grid will soon sign a $400 million loan from the World Bank and will go for a $200 million loan from the Asian Development Bank by the end of September, he added.

The company is also looking at joint ventures to increase its presence in the Middle East and Africa, he said.

Power Grid, meanwhile, has set up Powertel - a telecom platform for Punjab State Electricity Board (PSEB) – for starting e-services of the state power utility.

Powertel commissioned the first phase of the PSEB VPN project on 23 August under which it was entrusted with the rollout and management of PSEB Wide Area Network comprising 700 nodes on MPLS VPN-enabled network on a BOO basis, at an estimated annual cost of Rs5 crore.

The network would enable PSEB for numerous activities such as automated cash collection, consumer billing , customer care and inventory to name a few. The technology would help PSEB in many ways, i.e., lesser billing complaints, convenience of e-bills (depositing bills anywhere, anytime), increased internal efficiency, better monitoring and control and reducing procedural delays by on line authorisations and authentications etc, Power Grid said in a website release.