Key comparison of revised RFPs for MP Distribution Franchisee

Madhya Pradesh has revised its Distribution Franchisee (DF) RFPs for the 3rd time, inviting a third pre-bid conference on 15th October at Bhopal. (See earlier blog post Pre-Bid conference take-away from Madhya Pradesh Distribution Franchisee bids). Some major revisions in new RFPs are as follows:

1. The Distribution Franchisee scope has been revised to city/town level from earlier entire district level. Currently only one most favorable town has been picked in each of three MP zones - Sagar, Gwalior and Ujjain. The other six regions will be followed upon post finalizing DF appointment in first three.
2. In revised RFPs, there are no benchmarking minimum input rates given. The bidders are now free to select their input rates under following constraints:
• The input rates for 15 years should have only increasing trend
• Ratio of specified min. to max. input rates should be atleast 0.7
3. Customer services are given more weightage with mandated capex investment in meeting specified benchmark KPIs - SAIFI, SAIDI, min. customer services centers, consumer indexing and as laid under SOP by state Electricity Regulatory Commission.
4. In addition to detailing DF's Events of defaults, the revised RFPs detailed Distribution Licensee event of default of not being able to supply committed input units.

In our earlier blog Distribution Franchisee Attractiveness - Comparison for Madhya Pradesh's 9 districts, we ranked key DF decision parameters for 9 districts to help bidders with their selection criterion. The chart below lay down similar comparison for the 3 towns as released under revised RFPs. We have also indicated the percentage deviation of these key parameters from the earlier RFPs at district level.

DF attractiveness Matrix (Source: pManifold)

Some key changes that comes out clearly with the new revised RFPs are as follows:

1. Avg. 98% reduction in geographical area
2. Avg. 61% reduction in overall population, number of electricity consumers and also Electricity sales (lac kWh units)
3. Avg. 51% reduction in connected load
4. Avg. 1549% increase in electricity consumer density (clearly reveals urban/rural conflict)
5. Avg 18% and 22% increase in LT and HT consumption respectively (kWh/consumer/month)
6. Avg. 5% improvement in collection efficiency
7. Avg. 77% and 63% reduction in number of DTCs and transformer failure rate respectively
8. Distribution losses on avg. increases by only 2% while ATC losses on avg. reduce by 1%. If the numbers shared in RFPs are correct, this implies that rural areas contribution to the overall distribution and ATC losses is similar to that of urban areas. 

It is clear that the preferred order for established bidders from DF attractiveness will be Gwalior, followed by Ujjain and then Sagar. However for new entrants, Sagar could be a good choice to innovate a low capex and hence lower risk DF model.

pManifold takes pride in able to influence the revised RFP design and bringing more customer focus in on-going reforms attempted in power utilities. This success is also shared with MP Govt., their transaction advisors and also some bidders. With our continued work in the same, we hope to drive the importance and connection of customer monitoring with business financial performance in private and public utilities and help them develop an increased ROI based power Distribution model.

Independent all 3 towns customer intelligence reports 'EUCOPS - Electric Utility Customer Opinion, Preferences and Satisfaction' are available for purchase with pManifold. Sample report could be viewed online. We hope that the bidder community make use of this local customer intelligence to guide it's technical due-diligence better. (See detailed steps)

For more details contact Rahul Bagdia @ 95610-94490.

Post by Rahul Bagdia @ pManifold