Foreign equipment suppliers will have to guarantee uninterrupted flow of spare parts to the power companies for atleast 25 years to seek financing from Power Finance Corporation and other financial institutions.
Central Electricity Authority has put a clause that the term lending institutions should not finance projects, which are sourcing their equipment from China or elsewhere if the companies can not provide a guarantee to supply spares for a period of 25 years.
"Chinese do not have a technology of their own. It is Siemens or Toshiba that are manufacturing there, but whether that company will supply spares for the next 25 years for the maintenance of the machinery. If machines are being bought from an overseas company, we must ask the supplier to set up a base here," PFC CMD Satnam Singh said.
State-run Power Finance Corporation has said it would fund power equipment manufacturers like NTPC-BHEL, L&T-Mitsubishi and others in order to increase equipment availability in the market.
"We have created a Facilitation Group for funding equipment manufacturers in the sector so that we can have higher equipment available," Singh said adding that the group would be headed by an Executive Director of PFC.
The government has exempted goods based on super critical coal-based thermal technology procured for setting up 4,000 Mw ultra mega power projects (UMPPs) from excise duty.
Meanwhile, the government has relaxed External Commercial Borrowing (ECB) norms by allowing infrastructure companies to bring in $500 million raised abroad for rupee expenditure against the present limit of $100 million.
