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The Jindal Steel and Power Limited (JSPL) is mooting plan to expand its power business in African countries and will make Liberia the gateway.
The company Tuesday inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Liberian Government to set up a 350-Mw power plant. “JSPL has worked with us and we have reached an agreement with the company for setting up a power plant,” Liberia President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said.
The partnership (with the JSPL) will go beyond the power plant project, she said after visiting company’s power and steel plants here today. Sirleaf added that the Liberian government would be working with the JSPL to achieve the objective of industrial growth in the country as she was highly impressed with company’s working in Raigarh.
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The JSPL Chairman, Naveen Jindal said that the company was on an expansion mode in Africa and had been in parleys with many countries to set up power plants. “We have been talking to Senegal, Liberia, Botswana and other African countries and will soon get the result,” he said.
In Botswana, Jindal said, the company had coal mine and land had not been an issue in the country. The JSPL Chairman hinted that as compared to others, the norms in the African countries were comparatively flexible and investment friendly.
The track record of the JSPL would help the company to expand in other countries, Jindal said.
To start with its entry in the Africa, the company had given the final shape to its proposal to set up a 350-Mw thermal power plant in Liberia. The project is in the final stage and the remaining modalities will be completed soon.“The power project will have two units of 175-Mw each,” Ravi Uppal, Managing Director of JSPL, said. The project would be set up under Public Private Partnership (PPP) model and the Government of Liberia would be the customer, Uppal added.
He said the country was badly in need of power that it was generating through diesel-generated sets that was not viable. “The JSPL would fulfil the country’s power requirement,” he added. The work on the project would start soon, he said.
