Being Bullish on Power sector because...

The power sector in India is predominantly controlled by Government of India’s Public sector undertaking although there are various old private players. It is a highly regulated sector, but now new private players are entering this industry to take advantage of large demand supply gap in the nation. India is world's 6th largest energy consumer, accounting for 3.4% of global energy consumption (the top four countries being US, Japan, China and Russia together consuming about 49 percent of the total power generated globally). Due to India's economic rise, the demand for energy has grown at an average of 3.6% per annum over the past 30 years. In June 2010, the installed power generation capacity of India stood at 162,366 MW, which is about 4 percent of global power generation. The average per capita consumption of electricity in India is estimated to be 704 kWh during 2008-09. However, this is fairly low when compared to that of some of the developed and emerging nations such US (around 15,000 kWh) and China (around 1,800 kWh). The world average stands at 2,300 kWh. The Indian government has set ambitious goals in the 11th plan (“Power for All”) for power sector owing to which the power sector is poised for significant expansion. In order to provide availability of over 1000 KWh of per capita electricity by year 2012, this mission would require that the installed generation capacity should be at least 200,000 MW by 2012 from the present level of 156783.98 MW. Power requirement will double by 2020 to 400,000MW. This has resulted in massive addition plans being proposed in the sub-sectors of Generation Transmission and Distribution.

While some progress has been made at reducing the Transmission and Distribution (T&D) losses, these still remain substantially higher than the global benchmarks, at approximately 33 percent. In order to address some of the issues in this segment, reforms have been undertaken through unbundling the State Electricity Boards into separate Generation, Transmission and Distribution units and privatization of power distribution has been initiated either through the outright privatization or the franchisee route; results of these initiatives have been somewhat mixed. The Plant Load Factor (PLF) of Thermal Power Stations (TPSs) in the country has been steadily increasing over the years, representing higher utilization of the installed capacity. The average PLF of TPS’s of Power Utilities during (April-January, 2009-10) was 76.65% and that of previous year was 77.2%. While there has been a slow and gradual improvement in metering, billing and collection efficiency, the current loss levels still pose a significant challenge for distribution companies going forward. Renewable sources of energy and nuclear energy which are clean sources of energy usage are on the upswing and would contribute heavily in the times to come.

Vivek Agrawal

Summer Intern-Fundamental Analysis

DENIP Consultants Private Limited.