By Solar Times Bureau
After Union Budget presented on 1st Feb 2017, Industry experts opined on various aspects of the Power Industry. Read on .
Somesh Kumar, Partner – Power & Utilities, EY India
- 100% rural electrification to be achieved by 2018:
Impact: Bringing more consumers will mean more demand going forward. This coupled with improvements in distribution under UDAY will mean good news for power producers who are struggling for dispatch. All this will be contingent on two big factors a) Ability for Discoms to buy and pay and b) Available transmission capacity. It is also a matter of study whether we the current capacity addition scenario is sufficient to cater to the significant increase in demand – in short – Do we need more capacity addition? - 2,000 railway stations to be solar powered under solar mission:
Impact: Was expected. However, from implementation perspective, railways can explore to do this under opex model to reduce capex burden on the authority. Another aspect to be looked at seriously is how the generation from these assets are monitored. Railways may need to think about monitoring these benefits centrally as the scale up the initiative. - BCD on LNG to be reduced to 2.5%
Impact: To benefit gas based power stations as the may be able move up in the merit order dispatch. - MSME companies – Annual cr upto 50 cr to be taxed at 25%
Impact: This is good news for small developers/ contractors in the Rooftop space. This will make them more capitalised and will fillip their investments back in their business. Overall a good thing for the distributed energy business.