Heavy Seawater Pumps Aid India's Drive for Additional Power

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info (Johannesburg, South Africa)--At a time when large-scale heavy industrial water pumps are in the news with the focus on Japan's nuclear water-pumping disaster, India's Kirloskar Brothers Limited (KBL) (Pune) has commissioned what it claims to be the world's largest high-flow concrete volute pump.

The pump application is for a condenser at the first 800-megawatt (MW) unit of Tata Power Company Limited's (BSE:500400) (Mumbai, India) 4,000-MW ultra mega power project (UMPP) at Mundra, Gujarat.

KBL will supply a total of 10 cooling water concrete volute pumps for the Mundra thermal power station, which will have an aggregate throughput of 175,000 liters per second.

Ravindra Pande, KBL's power sector head, said that the Mundra project was a technological challenge as such massive concrete volute pumps had never before been installed in a power plant to handle seawater.

KBL is the first company to introduce concrete volute pumps in India. The company is one of three manufacturers in the world that has manufactured and installed 200-kilowatt (kW) canned motor pumps for nuclear applications. The company has created what it claims to be the world's largest pumping scheme, the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Scheme. The project will irrigate more than 2 million hectares of land and supply water to 4,620 towns and villages in the state of Gujarat.

The market for large-scale pumps for power stations is looking good as India pursues power generation targets in the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17).

The country's Central Electricity Authority (CEA) is looking for 75,000 MW to 100,000 MW of additional power generation capacity coming onto the grid in the period. The majority of the added power is expected to be thermal/coal-fired power.

Additional power supplied during the 11th Five-Year Plan, ending in March 2012, is expected to be about 51,000 MW, which falls short of the revised target of 62,000 MW, which was the first revision of an original 78,000-MW target. In the current period, 34,462 MW has been added, and a further 17,196 MW is expected to be added in the current fiscal year.

A significant positive factor is that power losses during transmission, which are currently estimated at 28-29%, are expected to be reduced by 15% during the 12th Five-Year Plan. Current total power generation capacity in India to date is about 175,000 MW.