Intelligent Energy commits to India with £1.2bn power provision contract during meeting with Prime Minister Modi as part of multi-billion UK-India Trade Deals
· Intelligent Energy has confirmed the major commitment to the development of clean energy for India's telecom sector during a meeting with British Prime Minister Cameron and Prime Minister Modi, hosted in London during Mr Modi's visit.
· Intelligent Energy presented a letter of commitment to Prime Minister Modi on Thursday evening, in which the company confirmed that:
"After previously agreeing to acquire the energy management business of Indian company GTL to provide efficient, clean and economical energy to 27,400 telecom towers in India…Intelligent Energy is now facilitating an initial order of over 10,000 hydrogen fuel cells, worth over £100 million. The deal will help to eventually create manufacturing jobs in India."
What this means for IE
· This contract has created an internal customer of real scale for IE allowing its fuel cells to be manufactured at volume and solving the 'at scale dilemma' that fuel cells and many other new energy technologies faced in the past, but here, without any subsidies. By solving this problem, the cost of manufacturing the technology will go down, making this a viable and cleaner alternative to diesel gen sets and internal combustion engines.
· Through the Company's 'design once deploy many times' strategy, reducing manufacturing costs will benefit IE's other two divisions (Motive and Consumer Electronics) by making Intelligent Energy's fuel cell technology ready for commercialisation as the other two divisions share substantially the same supply chains and core fuel cell technology.
· Yesterday's meeting is representative of the relationships Intelligent Energy has been creating in India since 2009 with local telecom tower operators and senior government officials, and the company looks forward to continuing to strengthen these ties.
· It is noted that at a time when the UK is increasing its diesel generator dependency for back-up power, British technology developed by Intelligent Energy is going to India to replace diesel generators which have proven to be less reliable, less efficient and heavily polluting.
· This transaction delivers contracted revenues of approximately £1.2 billion over ten years, which is a major development for Intelligent Energy and the telecom infrastructure industry. IE's technology will not only help to bring a stable, reliable power supply to these towers, but it will also demonstrate the full power of hydrogen fuel cells today.
· This transaction paves the way for IE to execute other similar deals with initial focus in India, re-stating the medium term target of 125,000 to 135,000 sites with power under contract.
· The initial order of 10,000 fuel cells is more than what is currently disclosed in the market in terms of fuel cells produced by other OEMs including car manufacturers.
