Power Grid Barmer HVDC Project: Rs 3,244 Crore a Year

Power Grid has picked up the two biggest transmission awards of the month inside three days, and the larger of them is a roughly 1,000 km high-voltage direct current line that has to be built across the Thar desert and two states beyond it. If you own foundation or earthmoving iron in Rajasthan, Gujarat or Maharashtra, this is the demand signal to plan around.

What Power Grid actually won

Renewable Watch reported the Barmer award on 4 September, and the specialist transmission desk T and D India carried both letters of intent a day later. The numbers line up across the two: 6,000 MW of HVDC capacity, a converter terminal at either end, and a bipole running roughly 1,000 km from the Rajasthan desert down to Maharashtra. Power Grid holds these on a build-own-operate-transfer basis, so it owns the asset and earns the annual charge. That is worth spelling out, because the Rs 3,244.33 crore figure is a yearly tariff, not the cost of building the line.

What does it mean for equipment buyers?

Power Grid does not self-perform this work. It splits HVDC and 765 kV schemes into EPC packages for tower foundations, erection and stringing, terminal civil works and access roads, then awards them out. That pattern has run through Skipper, Bajel Projects and Kalpataru order books all through the past month. Barmer is unusually machine-hungry because of where it goes: a desert alignment has almost no existing haul route, so contractors build the access track before they build a single tower.

In practice that means motor graders and compactors on access roads, piling rigs and excavators on tower foundations, and backhoe loaders on the pit and cable work nobody budgets properly for. The two converter terminals, plus three synchronous condensers across the two schemes, are heavy static lifts, which parks high-capacity crawler cranes at fixed points for long stretches rather than moving them along the line.

Our take: the rental market in western Rajasthan is the thing to watch here. A desert HVDC alignment concentrates a great deal of near-identical foundation work into a narrow corridor over two to three years, and that is the profile that tightens piling-rig and crane availability regionally long before it shows up in any national sales print. Fleet owners already committed to Gujarat renewable-zone packages should expect their crews to be bid for.

FAQ

Is Rs 3,244.33 crore the cost of building the Barmer HVDC line?

No. It is the annual transmission charge Power Grid quoted to win the scheme under tariff-based competitive bidding. The company builds, owns and operates the asset and recovers that charge every year, so it is not a construction contract value.

When will equipment actually be needed on the ground?

Not immediately. A letter of intent is the award stage. Survey, right-of-way and the EPC sub-package awards come first, and on schemes of this size that sequence usually takes several months before foundation work starts in volume.

Which machine classes does an HVDC line pull the most?

Piling rigs and excavators for tower foundations, graders and compactors for access roads across ungraded terrain, backhoe loaders for cable and pit work, and high-capacity cranes at the converter terminals and synchronous condenser sites.

Related on DesiMachines: Power Grid Wins Jam Khambhaliya Transmission Project: Rs 822.91 Crore a Year

Source: Renewable Watch