New Delhi: Faced with multiple domestic sectoral woes, the country's largest private power producer, Tata Power, is actively exploring overseas opportunities for generation and distribution projects in SAARC nations, Africa, Turkey and the Middle East.
Tata Power Managing Director Anil Sardana emphasised that his company cannot "keep waiting" for issues to get resolved in the Indian power sector.
"If we do not find issues getting resolved quickly here, it is not that we will keep waiting. We will go ahead and invest elsewhere," Sardana said.
"These days land, clearances are challenges everywhere. But we find of late, it is very difficult for Tatas to get that in some of the geographies, particularly India and similar geographies," he noted.
Tata Power has an installed capacity of over 3,790 MW and expects to have a capacity of 25,000 MW by 2017.
According to Sardana, Tata Power is becoming very active internationally, both for projects as well as resources.
"We have South East Asia and SAARC as one of our target markets. SAARC includes Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
Similarly, we have included Africas as our important geography. We have included Turkey and the Middle East as another geography," he noted.
Sardana pointed out that in these geographies Tata Power would look for power generation and distribution projects as well as resources. The firm would focus on thermal, wind and solar areas.
Among overseas ventures, the company has stakes in two Indonesian coal mines and it along with Norway's SN Power is developing an 880 MW hydro project in Nepal.
However, he said first preference would always be to invest in India where there are still opportunities.
"We will only hope that things in India will continue to move fast," he added.
Currently, Tata Power is executing thermal and renewable projects having total capacity of about 5,351 MW.
Meanwhile, costly Indonesian coal has put a question mark over the viability of Tata Power's 4,000 MW Mundra ultra mega project which was bagged through a competitive bidding.
A raft of problems including acute coal shortage and environmental hurdles are hurting the Indian power sector, which is expected to see a capacity addition of over 80,000 MW in the 12th Five-Year Plan Period (2012-17).
PTI
First Published: Wednesday, February 08, 2012, 12:43