Engineers India plans to expand footprint in thermal, nuclear power

Mint

29-05-2025

New Delhi: As the Centre aims to add thermal and nuclear power plants in the country to increase baseload capacity, state-run engineering consultancy and project management company Engineers India Ltd (EIL) is looking at taking more projects in both the power generation segments, its chairman and managing director (CMD) Vartika Shukla said on Thursday.
Addressing the media, Shukla said the company is in talks with players in the wind energy space to develop offshore wind projects as it diversifies further into sectors other than oil and gas.
'To meet the demand gap in the power segment, there are several thermal power plants which are reviving and which earlier we were not looking at,' said Shukla. 'So, we are also talking to some (power generation companies). We are looking at a PMC (project management consultancy) role for those projects. We also see in the non-oil and gas power sector, opportunities in offshore wind.'
The focus on thermal power comes in the backdrop of government plans to add 80GW of coal-based power generation capacity in the country by 2032 to meet rising power demand along with the ambitious energy transition goal of installing 500GW of non-fossil capacity by 2030.
On 30 April, Mint reported that the government may increase its coal-based capacity expansion plan to about 100GW amid rising coal production and growing power demand.
EIL has so far been involved in captive power plants and also in the relocation of a 300MW gas-based power plant.
Speaking of the plans in nuclear power, Shukla said the company has already entered into the space and has also trained its workforce for the sector.
'We have moved the needle towards more engagement towards the nuclear sector as well,' she said. 'We were present in the space when we did the Kundankulam project...we need to revisit that relationship. So, we have trained our people in BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre). We have built the competency within.'
Some of the nuclear projects in which EIL has been associated include the 2x1000MWe Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant-Unit 3 & 4, Cooling Water and Heat Recovery Systems for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) and NPCIL's Nuclear Power Project at Mithivirdi.
EIL's CMD further said the company is looking at entering the small modular reactors space. Currently, India has an installed nuclear power capacity of 8.18GW and the government aims to triple the capacity by 2032. The Centre has also set an ambitious target of 100 GW of nuclear power capacity by 2047.
On Thursday, EIL reported a more than twofold growth in its consolidated net profit for the quarter ended March at ₹ 279.81 crore, compared to ₹ 115.52 crore in the year-ago period. Its total income for the fourth quarter of FY25 was ₹ 1,046.57 crore, 22.2% higher on a year-on-year basis.
Addressing the press conference, Shukla said EIL secured an order inflow of ₹ 8,214 crore in 2024-25, an all-time high in the journey of the company, leading to an order book of around ₹ 11,700 crore.
'The share of its diversified business segments has increased significantly with around 36% of the order inflow shared by energy efficient infrastructure segment in the past fiscal, which includes high-end data centres, state-of-the-art laboratories, and academic complexes, among others,' said a company statement.
In the previous fiscal, EIL secured around 36% of its business through competitive bidding with the share of consultancy standing at around 56% of the order inflow in the fiscal. The contribution of order inflow from international businesses reached ₹ 1,077 crore, the highest in the past decade, the statement added.