Interviews

For the consumers and the market the star rating in the initial years appeared very attractive, but in the past few years, the market has failed to register the expected response for star rated products. This is because a majority of the consumers are from agricultural background, constituting 45 per cent of the domestic pump market.

Excerpts from the Minister of State (I/C) for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines, Piyush Goyal´s speeches at SWITCH 2016 conference in Vadodara on October 7, 2016.

Seeing the potential of the Indian market our founder Andreas Lapp decided to set up operations in India way back in 1996 with the establishment of its very first manufacturing unit outside Germany, at Jigani, Bangalore.

Preliminary estimates indicate capital expenditure requirement in the range of Rs.1.25 Cr/MW to Rs.1.5 Cr/MW, i.e about 20-25 per cent of the capital cost of a coal based power plant. Considering the above estimates, the total outlay involved could be about Rs.2.5 lakh crores.

We as of now have 47,228 MW of the operational capacity through thermal. We have also added another 50 MW of solar capacity, taking our total to 47,278 MW. This year we are going to add about 4,500 MW of capacity out of the 24,000 MW which is under construction.

Essar Power Gujarat Limited (EPGL) is a special purpose vehicle of Essar Power Limited. This was created basically to implement the power purchase agreement (PPA), which was signed with Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Limited (GUVNL) in 2007.

In the recent past, we saw a lot of investment in power generation, but not sufficient in power transmission and distribution (T&D). Investments in transmission have caught up more recently, but the lag has meant that even though we have surplus generation capacities, not all the demand is always served.

It has registered an overall improvement in efficiency terms in diesel engines. The improvement happened over a period of time. Now the fuel efficiency is much higher in comparison to what it was 10 years ago.

We have a business model where we are in both B2B and B2C markets. Our B2B endeavours include roads, transportation, power transmission lines, ports and metro rails among others, while our B2C business deals in providing integrated utilities like power, water, gas and internet to the masses.