“We are trying to go ahead with this huge target,” Prime Minister Prachanda said.
“We have huge hydropower potential, and India is a huge market,” Prachanda said. “We are in discussions and are trying to develop a unified understanding with India.”
Nepal is planning to export power will bring revenues to facilitate fund the hydropower ambition, but cross-border cables to energy-hungry India are lacking.
“If they (India) commit to buying power from us, we could be like Norway,” Manoj Bahadur Shrestha, chairman of Himalayan Banksaid.
A drought in Nepal has hit supplies, forcing power reductions of around 18 hours per day and heaping pressure on Prachanda’s coalition government to fix the problem.
“People have huge difficulties in their lives,” said Prachanda, the former Maoist guerrilla who won a surprise election victory in April 2008.
Norway Company Eager
Opening plans have been drawn up for around 2,000 MW of new capacity in many projects, including the government’s 456 MW Upper Tamakoshi project and the 600 MW Tamakoshi 2/3, which is under feasibility studies by Norwegian firm SN Power.
SN Power, which spends in hydropower plants in Asia and Latin America, is the main partner in the 60 MW Khimiti plant east of Kathmandu. It and its parent company Statkraft AS have been developing hydropower in Nepal since 1993.
“Nepal is part of our growth strategy,” SN Power’s Chief Executive Oistein Andresen told Prachanda and accompanying Nepali officials in a presentation at company headquarters in Oslo.
“It would be very important to have power lines between India and Nepal,” he said.
Nadia Sood, SN Power’s Executive Vice President for South Asia, said: “Until those go up, there will be less incentive for developers of large hydropower projects.”
