Tata Power plans to invest around Rs 1,000 crore over the next three years to lay its own cable network in Mumbai

The country's largest private power generation company Tata Power plans to invest around Rs 1,000 crore over the next three years to lay its own cable network in Mumbai for power distribution, a senior company official said here.

"We will be investing around Rs 1,000 crore over the next three years to lay our own distribution network in Mumbai for supplying power to our customers," TPC Executive Director Sankaranarayanan Padmanabhan told reporters late yesterday after the company's AGM.

At present, TPC serves 8 lakh customers using the wire networks of BEST and Reliance Infrastructure to distribute electricity in the city and the suburbs, respectively.

TPC also has its own network in certain parts of the metropolis.

TPC is charged a fee called wheeling charges for distributing power through the RInfra and BEST networks, which the company then recovers from its consumers.

"Law allows wheeling and permits us to use the network of Reliance to distribute electricity in the suburbs. Before the Supreme Court order, we were not allowed to lay parallel network. But now we have rolled out a plan to lay our own network. We have put up a proposal to the MERC," he said.

In 2008, the Supreme Court had allowed TPC to supply electricity to retail consumers having a requirement of 1,000 KV or less in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, in a recent order, state electricity regulator MERC granted RInfra a licence to distribute electricity in the suburbs for 25 years, as the company's licence was due to expire on August 15.

MERC had rejected the proposals of four other bidders, including Torrent Power, Lanco Infrastructure, MSEDCL and Indiabulls, saying that they did not have their own networks in place, and granted Rinfra the licence in the "public interest".