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01 JULY 2001

Work stalls on Indian power project

US firm CMS Energy Corp's LNG-based power project at Ennore in southern India is now completely stalled for want of a credit support mechanism from the Indian government, according to Rodney Boulanger, CMS Generation Company's president.

Boulanger said in a statement to Reuters that the firm though "not threatening to withdraw" from the project was "losing heart". The firm's statement comes against a backdrop of a bitter payment row between US energy giant Enron Corp's $2.9-billion, 2,184-MW Indian unit, the Dabhol Power Company, and the state-run utility in India's western Maharashtra state.

CMS, along with India's Grasim Industries, leads a consortium to build a $1.6-billion LNG-terminal-cum-1,850 MW power plant at Ennore port, just north of Madras.

"The Ennore project is essentially stalled until the government can design and implement a solution that will cause lenders to provide loans to the project," the statement quoted Boulanger as saying.

The CMS-led consortium won the LNG project from the Tamil Nadu state government in 1998 and plans to build a 2.5-million tonnes a year LNG import, storage and regasification terminal. The LNG is to be imported from Qatar's RasGas and the electricity from the power plant will be sold to the federal government-owned Power Trading Corp of India.

$13bn for Taiwan's power grid

Taipei: State-owned Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) will start a NT$454.4 billion ($13.17 billion) electricity grid project this month to improve the country's power transmission network, said Taiwan's Economic Affairs Minister Lin Hsin-yi.

Around NT$300 billion of the planned costs will be spent on procurement of electric equipment, he said.

Through the project, Taipower plans to improve Taiwan's power transmission network by building more than 200 substations and thousands of kilometres of power line. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2006, according to Hsin-yi.

Works starts on scientific centre

Xi'an, China: The third phase construction of the Xi'an New and High-tech Development Zone, the largest scientific centre in western China, has commenced recently.

A total of 7 billion yuan ($846.8 million) has been used for the zone's infrastructure projects over the past decade.

In the first and second phases, a 12-sq km area has been dotted with foreign-funded enterprises. The third phase, covering 13 sq km, comprises an electronic park, a software park, a high-tech export park and a pharmaceutical park.