State-owned thermal power major Damodar Valley Corporation will focus only on solar projects to add capacity, a top official said. It has already mooted 1776-MW floating solar projects in four of its dams in West Bengal and Jharkhand, the two states that jointly own the corporation along with the Union government.

DVC has finalised a 50-MW solar project at Panchet (West Bengal), the tender for which has been floated, he said.

"We will execute 1776-MW floating solar plants in the four dams of Maithon, Tilaya, Konar and Panchet. The project will be executed in three phases and the first will be of 50MW," DVC member secretary Prabir Kumar Mukhopadhyay told .

He said the company has zeroed in on the L1 bidder for the Panchet project and the work order will be finalised in early October.

The feasibility study of the solar projects, which are likely to utilise about 15 per cent of their capacities, was carried out by the Solar Energy Corporation of India.

Mukhopadhyay said the corporation has large tracts of land and in the last two years, it had retired old thermal capacities to the tune of 840 MW at Bokaro, Chandrapura and Durgapur.

DVC now has about 7,000 MW of thermal capacity.

The corporation is also concerned about the spares of the 1,200-MW thermal power plant at Raghunathpur in Purulia district of West Bengal, as supply of its parts come from Shanghai Electric Corporation in China.

The Indian Army and the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) have been locked in a tense standoff in multiple areas along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh since early May.

"We are concerned about maintenance of spares, which iscritical for running the plant. Clarification has been sought as to whether we can import from China," Mukhopadhyay said.

Indigenisation of critical spares will take at least two years, company officials said.

This article is reproduced at energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com.