Govt plans five new UMPPs

 With the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government aiming to provide 24X7 electricity to consumers by 2019, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday announced five more ultra mega power projects (UMPPs) with an investment of around Rs 1 lakh crore.

UMPPs are coal-based and have a generation capacity of 4,000 MW. Jaitley, however, did not announce the states where these projects are proposed to be set up.

So far, four UMPPs have been awarded, of which Sasan (Madhya Pradesh), Krishnapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Tilaiya (Jharkhand) have been bagged by Reliance Power and Tata Power is operating the Mundra UMPP in Gujarat.

Under the “plug and play” system, coal blocks will be auctioned after they are granted various clearances to speed up and simplify mining and get better valuation, the finance minister said.

One such project is likely to be set up in the power-starved state of Bihar, which would be fed by a mine either in Jharkhand or Odisha.

The project is expected to be awarded in a transparent manner and only after getting all required clearances and coal linkages, including from the Power Finance Corporation—the nodal agency for UMPPs in the country.

Power Minister Piyush Goyal had said in November that sufficient number of coal blocks would be allotted for power projects.

The Economic Survey, which was tabled in Parliament on Friday, had said that between April-December last year, the target of 765.39 billion units of power was more than achieved as a total of 793.73 billion units had been generated.

The additional capacity as on December 31, 2014, was 50,058 MW, constituting 56.6 per cent of the 12th plan.