BackDamodar Valley Corp Q4 profit at Rs19 crore
Damodar Valley Corp, which in fiscal year 2018 reported revenue of Rs15,729 crore, up 2% over the previous year, is aiming to close the current year with a net profit of Rs552 crore
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Kolkata: Damodar Valley Corp. Ltd (DVC), a power utility jointly owned by the Centre and the state governments of West Bengal and Jharkhand, on Friday said it had posted a net profit of Rs19 crore in the March quarter, staging a turnaround after making losses consecutively for 15 quarters.
The turnaround came on the back of a spurt in the sale of power and more efficient utilisation of its generating units. The company, which in fiscal year 2018 reported revenue of Rs15,729 crore, up 2% over the previous year, is aiming to close the current year with a net profit of Rs552 crore.
Plant load factor, or PLF—a measure of utilisation of power plants—jumped from 52.14% in the previous year to 56.04% in fiscal 2018. In the current year, DVC expects its PLF to rise to 74.87% and revenue from power sales to jump to Rs18,468 crore from Rs14,955 crore in fiscal 2018—a growth of 23.5%.
DVC’s total power generation in fiscal 2018 at 35.692 billion units, up 7.14% year-on-year, was a record high. (One unit is one kilowatt-hour.)
Net loss for fiscal 2018 narrowed to Rs871 crore from Rs907 crore in the previous year even after the company repaid loans of Rs2,000 crore. DVC’s outstanding debt at the end of March was around Rs26,000 crore, Rs2,000 crore lower than a year earlier.
DVC on Friday formally announced that it would not sell its Raghunathpur thermal power station as planned earlier. The company had earlier proposed to sell the 1,200 megawatt (mw) unit, set up at an estimated cost of Rs9,300 crore, to NLC India Ltd, but the plan did not materialise.
DVC is looking to sell power from its Raghunathpur power plant to West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Co. Ltd (WBSEDCL). Retaining the unit and selling power from it to WBSEDCL will result in the local government earning up to Rs400 crore in annual revenue on account of coal cess and goods and services tax, said P.K. Mukhopahdyay, chairman, DVC.
For the Raghunathpur unit, DVC has a long-term power purchase agreement with the Punjab government for 450 mw, and with the Bangladesh government for 300 mw.
It still has redundant capacity at Raghunathpur for which it is pursuing a similar long term power purchase agreement with the West Bengal government, one of the stakeholders in the company which had opposed the proposed sale of the power plant.
In fiscal 2018, DVC mothballed old, relatively less efficient power plants that had a total generation capacity of 820 mw, according to Mukhopadhyay. Over the next two years, the company proposes to close down at least three more units with a capacity of 560 mw.
To replenish the capacity being retired, DVC is looking to set up a new unit at Durgapur in West Bengal. The company already has land there, and the so called super-critical capacity of the unit is expected to be 600-800 mw, Mukhopadhyay said.
Post-2020, the company may have to mothball three units at Mejia, with a total generation capacity of 630 mw. DVC currently has capacity to generate 7,090 mw of thermal power and 147 mw of hydel power.
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