The Hindu Business Line : Tiruchi windmill units on expansion spree

MORE often than not, it is only with a frown of impatience that Mr K. Premanathan surveys his company's `paint shop', which does not look like one. Massive pipes — into whose mouths you can stand a man and his 12-year-old son one atop the other — lie strewn all around the place.

There are perhaps a hundred of them. On one side of the open expanse, some workers spray paint onto the pipes.

When they are done, the `pipes' will be transported several hundred kilometres to some windy place, where three or four of them will be bolted vertically up, so that they soar majestically 75 metres above their foundation. Soon, there will be generators and blades on the top and, with a gush of wind, they will generate electricity.

But it is not that side of the factory that brings the frown on to Mr Premanathan's face. It is its other side — where some of the 300 construction workers, beating the blazing sun of central Tamil Nadu, are cementing bricks. Their colleagues are pouring concrete into a pit, which will soon be the foundation of a huge pillar.

Mr Premanathan wants the building to come up fast, so that he can move his imported machinery into it and paint his windmill towers in a more scientific manner. He wants his company, Anand Engineering Products Pvt Ltd, already the market leader, to be a standard setter.

When Mr Premanathan's father started Anand Engineering back in 1976, mainly for making various products for BHEL on contract, he could have scarcely predicted that the company would be manufacturing windmill towers, leave alone be a market leader in that business.

Like most other tower manufacturers, Anand Engineering got nudged into the business by paucity of orders from BHEL, in the mid 1990s. In the past, windmill business has swung up and down, and therefore, although Anand Engineering had decided to stick with windmills, the boom that began in 2003, swept it off its feet. From then on, the gasp was not for orders, but for capacity.

Last year, Anand Engineering made 230 of the 500-odd windmill towers produced in Tiruchi, or, roughly a fourth of those produced in the country. In the current year, it will make 450, which will take its turnover to Rs 60 crore, from last year's Rs 27 crore.

NEG Micon, Suzlon and Pioneer are flooding the company with orders that provide an economic justification for Mr Premanathan, Managing Director, Anand Engineering, to invest Rs 50 crore in expansion. The State Bank of India has willingly given Rs 35 crore for the project, which is today half complete.

Today, Anand Engineering stands as a symbol of what Tiruchi is turning into — the hub for windmill tower manufacturing. It is clearly a recent phenomenon.

Walk down any of those dusty bylanes of the Thuvakudi industrial estate, you find the huge, tapering steel pipes all over the place — something that

was absent even two years ago. This year, Tiruchi will make between 750 and 1,000 towers; the number is expected to double next year. Next year, Anand Engineering alone will make 800 towers.

Practically every company in the business wants to expand. For example, the Rs 10-crore Toolfab Engineering Industries (P) Ltd, is investing Rs 15 crore to treble its processing capacity from 100 tonnes of steel today. Last year, the company produced 30 towers, and expects to do 100 in the current year and twice as much in the next.

How long will the party last ? "Ten years," is Mr Premanathan's guess. India, with 3,000 MW of installed windpower capacity, has the world's third largest capacity, but has a lot to catch up with the potential. Studies show that the country can have 45,000 MW of windpower capacity. This has attracted many multinational players into the business — NEG Micon, Enercon, Suzlon and, recently, GE.

Even with high capacity windmills, each MW of installed capacity needs on an average one windmill. A windmill tower of 750 kva weighs 100 tonnes, which calls for as many tonnes of steel and at least a tonne of welding material to hold together. Big business indeed.

Still, over time, the windy sites in the country are bound to get saturated and there is likely to be a gap of at least a decade before large-scale replacement orders kick in.

The windmill tower manufacturers of Tiruchi know only too well that they are riding the crest of a wave. Windmill companies pay well, around Rs 17,000 per tonne of steel, which betters the best rates offered by boiler manufacturers such as BHEL, Cethar Vessels, Veesons and G.B.Engineering.

"We want to make use of this opportunity to upgrade our facilities," says Mr C. Madan Mohan, Managing Director, Toolfab Engineering. Like Anand Engineering, Toolfab also wants to get into boiler manufacturing.

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