Patel Engg completes land buys for Tamil Nadu plant

Patel Engineering, the Mumbai-based infrastructure company, will get the final approval for the acquisition of 800 acres for its 1,320 megawatt thermal power project in a week, said director, business development, Ashwin Parmar.

The Rs 5,500-crore project is planned in Nagapattinam, 300 kms from Chennai, Tamil Nadu.  The company had bagged the project a year-and-a-half back. “We began acquiring land for the project then and now it’s complete. The public hearing happened on October 20,” Parmar said.

The plant will have three units of 440 mw each. “The first will be commissioned in 2012 and the other two with a gap of two years between them,” Parmar said.  He said that most of the power generated will be sold on a merchant basis while the rest will be supplied to Tamil Nadu.

Part of the coal required for the project will come from Indonesia while the company has already applied to the government for the rest of the requirement. The firm is hopeful of achieving closure for the project by the first quarter of the next fiscal.

It raised Rs 344 crore through a qualified institutional placement in October to fund, among other things, development projects in power, roads and realty.  Patel is developing another power project, a 120 mw hydropower plant, worth Rs 800 crore in Gongri, Arunachal Pradesh.

Asked what kind of power projects the company’s thrust will be on in the future, “In the long run we would like to focus on hydropower. But to begin with, we want to do thermal projects, too,” Parmar said.

Patel has put in bids for two hydropower projects of less than 100 mw each in Himachal Pradesh. Parmar said the firm is also looking at projects in Nepal.