After five years, Dabhol starts, trips and starts

Ratnagiri Gas and Power Pvt Ltd (RGPPL), the new avatar of Dabhol Power Corporation, resumed power generation today, more than five years after it was mothballed.

Though the plant had to be shut down within a few hours as officials found that one of its two cooling plants was not functioning properly, it resumed operations at around 6 pm.

A senior RGPPL official said the plant was expected to produce 100 Mw by late night. The plant had to be shut down when production reached 60-65 Mw at around 8.30 am today. It was learnt that the desiccating operation carried out at the cooling tower was not effective and needed to be redone.

"After synchronisation, such shutdowns at initial stages are common," he said. By mid-May the plant is expected to reach its full capacity and produce 740 Mw. The 740-Mw first phase of the project will run on naphtha for the first few months till it receives natural gas supplies.

"There was no shortage of naphtha... but after being shut down for a long period, the plant would take some time to run on full capacity," Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said.

The power plant in the Ratnagiri district was mothballed in 2001 following a bitter power tariff dispute between its promoter Enron Corporation and sole customer Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB).

It came to life early Sunday morning (a run-up to final operations) when one of the gas turbines of the plant completed the crucial synchronisation process and started supplying power to the grid.

According to top NTPC officials, the synchronisation process, which started at around 8 am on Sunday, lasted for two hours and supplied about 20-25 Mw power to the grid. The synchronisation was achieved for gas turbine 2A of Block II of the 2,184 Mw power plant.

The RGPPL has a chequered history. In 1993, the Houston-based Enron corporation signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Maharashtra government to set up a $3 billion power plan at Dabhol.

The Shiv Sena-BJP government, which came to power in 1995 defeating the Congress government that signed the MoU, scrapped the project and forced Enron to renegotiate the deal.

The MSEB, one of the promoters of Dabhol Power Company (DPC) which was buying power from it, defaulted in paying its dues in November 2000. DPC retaliated by invoking the central government's counter-guarantee that led to a series of litigations and arbitrations in India and abroad.

In December 2001, when Enron was declared bankrupt in the US, GE and Bechtel bought out Enron's 65 per cent equity stake in DPC, taking their combined stake to 85 per cent.

In July last year, after a long negotiation process, GE, Bechtel and the foreign lenders to the project were paid off and the DPC assets were taken over by RGPPL, a joint venture between NTPC and GAIL India in which the Maharashtra government also holds a 15 per cent stake.