Shares of Torrent Power surged nearly 9 percent to hit their record high in intra-day deals on Wednesday after the company announced that it has signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with the Maharashtra government for three Pumped Storage Hydro Projects of 5,700 MW capacity.
Via this project, Torrent Power, a renewable energy player, will now enter the storage solutions space.
"The projects would entail an investment of about ₹27,000 crore and would provide employment to approximately 13,500 people during the construction period. Torrent intends to execute these projects over a period of 5 years," the company said in an exchange filing.
Stock Price
Torrent Power rose as much as 8.8 percent in intra-day deals to its record high of ₹666. With this, the stock is currently over 54 percent higher than its 52-week low of ₹430.90, hit on January 30, 2023.
Meanwhile, the stock has advanced 33 percent in the last one year and 35 percent in 2023 YTD, giving positive returns in 4 of the 6 months of the current calendar year. It has jumped over 19 percent just in June so far after a completely flat May.
Project Info
In the press release, the company further informed that the projects would be executed at three sites identified by Torrent namely Karjat (3,000 MW) in Raigarh District, Maval (1,200 MW) and Junnar (1,500 MW) in Pune District, adding that all the sites are off-stream and the projects are planned to provide a minimum of six hours of energy storage on a daily basis.
The company also noted that the share of renewable power, which is intermittent in nature, is rapidly increasing in the grid and this necessitates energy storage for load management and meeting peak demand.
"Pumped Storage Hydro is an established, proven and cost-effective technology for firm, flexible and dispatchable power. PSH is a configuration of two water reservoirs at different elevations. Water is pumped to the upper reservoir at the time of excess power when it is the cheapest. At the time of demand when power is expensive, water flow from the upper reservoir to the lower reservoir generates power with a hydraulic turbine. PSH is a much superior solution than Battery for energy storage as it is cheaper, has a longer life of 40 years, provides longer duration storage of 6 to 10 hours with the feasibility of multiple cycle operations during the day," the filing explained.
Torrent Power currently has an aggregate installed generation capacity of 4.1 GW and a renewable capacity of 0.7 GW under development.
Earnings
In the March quarter, the company turned profitable again. It posted a net profit of ₹450 crore in Q4FY23 versus a net loss of ₹488 crore in the year-ago period. Meanwhile, its revenue surged over 61 percent to ₹6,038 crore in the quarter under review as against ₹3,744 crore in the same quarter last year.
Torrent Power, with a turnover of ₹25,694 crore, is the integrated power utility of the diversified Torrent Group with group revenues of ₹37,500 crore and a group market cap of ₹87,000 crore. It is one of the largest companies in the country’s power sector with a presence across the entire power value chain of generation, transmission, and distribution.
