Power Play ; Having Engineered a Turnaround, Cesc Now has Big-Ticket Expansion Plans That Go Beyond the Boundaries of Bengal.

Summary

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On a summer evening in 1989, a young man in his 20s was leisurely sipping a cup of tea and possibly eating meringues with cream with his friends at Flury's, one of Kolkata's heritage tea joints on Park Street, watching the world go by. Suddenly, all the lights and fans went off. They stayed off for hours. Flury's patrons, including members of his friends' circle, pointed fingers at the young man, holding him responsible for the long power cut, which was not unusual in those days in the city. The man in the unenviable spotlight (well, just figuratively)? Sanjeev Goenka, now 44, and Vice Chairman, RPG Enterprises, which has been running CESC since acquiring it in 1989. "Just the other day, I got a call from my 14- year-old son, who was very annoyed and upset. 'This is just not done Chachu (Goenka's son, incidentally, calls him Chachu). How do you run the company? We had six minutes of power cut at the science lab today,' my son told me," Goenka says, driving home how people's expectations have gone up with the power utility's improved performances over the years. Still, the incident at Flury's will always be etched in Goenka's memory.

It is of course a distant memory, what with Kolkata no longer a victim of long-drawn blackouts. That's because CESC plants are now operating at a plant load factor (PLF) of 98.5 per cent (which simply means that the plants are utilising 98.5 per cent of their capacity to produce power). Transmission & distribution (T&D) losses have come down from 24.8 per cent in 2000-01 to 15.8 per cent in October 2005, which is the second best in the country. CESC is also the first power utility to have started exporting power to the National Power Grid. The beleaguered power utility has also come out of the red; it earned profits of Rs 147.20 crore and Rs 70.55 crore in 2004-05 and 2003-04, respectively, after incurring a loss of Rs 5.23 crore the previous fiscal.

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Power Play ; Having Engineered a Turnaround, Cesc Now has Big-Ticket Expansion Plans That Go Beyond the Boundaries of Bengal.

Emboldened by this turnaround, CESC is now in expansion mode. It plans to set up four new projects over the next five to six years with a total capacity of 3,250 mw and a capital outlay of Rs 13,000 crore. The new plants will come up...

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