Surana Telecom plans to offload 20% of equity in Surana Ventures Limited – its solar power subsidiary – to FIIs. The money will be used to fund SVLs expansion plans.
Surana Ventures has a focus on solar PV. It has a module manufacturing unit and a solar cell manufacturing unit in the Fab City in Hyderabad. It is also establishing a 5 MW power plant in Hyderabad at a cost of Rs 63 crores (that puts the cost at Rs 12 crore per MW, much lower than the 17-18 crores that’s being touted everywhere…in fact, the capital cost of solar PV plant appears to vary significantly depending on the person you are talking to!).
A note that I found interesting in the article about Surana was that the company claims that the price paid for solar PV based power generation in Europe is Rs 25 per unit. This is indeed true, though I guess not for all countries – see th Wikipedia article here. In India, currently there is a price of Rs 12 per KWh along with the facility to avail accelerated depreciation (80% in first year), but with the National Solar Mission round the corner, it is most likely that the depreciation benefit will be removed and the price per unit would be Rs 16, which would make it quite attractive indeed for power producers.
