L&T wins EPC deal for Rajasthan supercritical power plant

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has bagged a complete engineering, procurement & construction (EPC) order.

The company, on Friday, announced that it had secured an order of Rs. 5,689 crore from the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam for setting up a 2 x 660 MW supercritical thermal power project on a complete EPC basis.

The project has a stringent completion schedule of 42 months for Unit 1 and 45 months for Unit 2.

The company’s manufacturing plant in Hazira has joint ventures with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to make supercritical boilers and turbines. “The plant is very new, and it is premature to say what the break-even point would be,” S.N. Roy, senior executive vice-president & member of the board of L&T, told a press conference here.

With the Rajasthan contract, L&T now has orders for supply and installation of 26 supercritical steam generators and steam turbine generators of 660 MW, 700 MW and 800 MW. The plant has a capacity of around 5,000 MW per annum, and this can be expanded to 6,000 MW.

Increased utilisation

“But we would be well off at a 60-65 per cent capacity utilisation at the plant,” Mr. Roy said, adding that the current order would increase capacity utilisation to 70-75 per cent.

He said that L&T was doing up to 91 per cent of EPC project in-house, with the rest coming from vendors.

He added that there were 8 large orders likely to come up for bidding this year and that “we are starving for orders and expect to get about 2 to 3 of them. There is no order likely to come this quarter, and we can take up to 50 per cent more orders. Our order book for power plants is at Rs. 25,000-26,000 crore and the mix is 30:70 between public and private sector. The Rajasthan order would change it to 50:50.”