Larsen & Toubro Ltd., India’s largest engineering company, aims to win 60 billion rupees ($1.3 billion) of orders a year building nuclear reactors by 2015 as a global shift to cleaner energy spurs demand for atomic plants. The first orders for the foreign reactors will start coming in 2011, according to M.V. Kotwal, Larsen’s senior vice president. L&T has capabilities to cater to the needs for critical equipment for Russian, French or American technologies.
Atomic energy companies led by Areva SA and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy are flocking to India after a three-decade global ban on nuclear trade was lifted last year. Global spending on new reactors may reach as much as $1.05 trillion by 2030, according to management consultants Capgemini, as fossil-fuel generators are retired and governments seek carbon-emission cuts.
Larsen has the capacity to build four nuclear reactors of about 1,000 megawatts each at a time and can increase capability as it secures orders. L&T has signed preliminary agreements with Wilmington, North Carolina-based GE Hitachi, Monroeville, Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse Electric Co., a subsidiary of Tokyo’s Toshiba Corp., and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., based in Mississauga, this year.
L&T has formed a joint venture with state-owned Nuclear Power Corp. of India for a forging plant to produce components for energy projects, including atomic power plants. India plans to increase its nuclear power generation capacity 10-fold to 40,000 megawatts by 2020 and has identified two sites for U.S. companies to build plants and one for Paris- based Areva, the world’s biggest maker of nuclear reactors. Fifty plants are being built worldwide, almost double the number under construction in 2004, according to the association in London.
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