City based Environ Energy-Tech Service Ltd (EETSL), a Rs250 crore company, hopes to set up an integrated solar power complex along with a polysilicon plant spread over 800 acres at Haldia with an investment of Rs 5,500 crore.
The project would be executed in three phases.
It could generate 250MW of solar power annually.
In the first phase the complex will produce solar cells and panels by importing polysilicon.
Net investment in the first phase was around Rs350 crore and it was scheduled to be executed by October 2009.
Around 2500 tons per annum (tpa) of polysilicon would be produced from the second phase scheduled to be commissioned in 2010, with capacity to be subsequently scaled up to 5000tpa in the third phase by 2011.
The complex would start production of 180 millimetre thick solar wafers then. Investments in second and third phases would be Rs2500 crore and Rs1100 crore respectively. The remaining outlay would be spent in the fourth phase when the complex would could start producing semiconductor chips. Planning for that would start from 2011. It had 200 acres in possession and hoped to get remaining 600 acre in phases within the next one year, Jyoti Poddar, director, EETSL, claimed.
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The Rs250 crore EETSL floated a special purpose vehicle called Bhaskar Silicon Ltd (BSL), in which promoters would have a 25-30 per cent equity stake.
Singapore-based Environ Energy Group was the holding company of EETSL, which aimed to list on the Singapore stock exchange and subsequently in India within the next one year.
BSL would also be listed eventually, Poddar claimed.
The group acquired Shell Solar Ltd. from Shell Petroleum in October last year for an undisclosed sum.
Polysilicon, the raw material for manufacturing solar panels, was a backward integration step for the company.
While the equity structure of the SPV is yet to be finalised, Srei Infrastructure Finance would act as equity partner together with Centrotherm Photovoltaics AG of Germany, US based private equity firm Perseus LLC, and Green Power Corporation (GPC), the renewable energy arm of the state government. GPC was likely to have 5 per cent stake in the SPV. "Given the government target of 5000MW of installed solar power capacity by 2012, we expect demand growth of more than 500MW per year", Poddar claimed.
BSL said exporting solar panels or modules was unlikely as domestic demand could surge.
Currently, only 60-70MW of solar modules were manufactured in India, with market size pegged at Rs2000-2500 crore.
Incentives announced in the semiconductor policy in January 2008 provided for special provisions for solar power.
Many large solar plants would come up in the country in the next five years, Poddar said. Rajasthan alone had generating potential of 250MW of solar power, and applications for around 100MW solar plants were lying with the West Bengal Renewable Energy Development Authority(WBREDA), he claimed.
The state government was keen to see the project getting implemented soon as it had huge potential for spawning downstream industries in solar panel and cell manufacturing in West Bengal, state industries minister Nirupam Sen said.