Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd is India’s largest homegrown builder of power plants and heavy industrial equipment - a state-owned engineering giant that has supplied the turbines, generators, and boilers behind roughly half the country’s conventional electricity capacity over five decades. Born in 1964 as a central public sector enterprise and now holding ‘Maharatna’ status, it was created to give India the industrial backbone to make its own power equipment rather than importing it, and it has spent those decades absorbing technology from global leaders and turning it into in-house manufacturing capability across fifteen factories. The recurring pattern that explains the company is a deliberate pivot: it is transforming from a business built on coal-fired thermal power into a diversified engineering house that takes the same EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) and heavy-manufacturing skills into nuclear, hydro, railways, defence, and green energy - using the cash and credibility of its legacy to open new frontiers. # Business segments Three engines at different stages - a power-generation anchor that still dominates the order book, a diversified industrial arm built on the same manufacturing backbone, and a green-energy bet being assembled from in-house technology and government partnerships. ## 1. Power generation: the anchor that still lights half of India **BHEL is one of the few companies on earth that can build an entire thermal, hydro, or nuclear power station from the ground up - and it already sits inside more than half of India’s conventional power capacity.** - **Builder of the whole power island** - the company designs, manufactures, and commissions the core of a power plant: steam turbines, generators, boilers, and their matching auxiliaries, up to 1,000 MW per unit, and delivers them as a turnkey EPC contract or as a main-plant package. That means a customer can hand BHEL a site and get back a working power station. - **Thermal is the bedrock** - BHEL holds a 54% share of India’s installed thermal capacity and its sets generate over 56% of the country’s coal and lignite-fired electricity, running at an average plant load factor that beats the national average. It won all twelve 800 MW thermal units tendered in India in FY 2023-24 - 9.6 GW in a single year - and has contracted 90 supercritical boilers, the cleaner-coal technology that operates at higher temperatures and pressures to squeeze more electricity from each tonne of fuel. - **Hydro is a quiet giant** - with more than 40% of India’s hydro electro-mechanical market and 46% of installed hydro capacity, BHEL has supplied over 550 hydroelectric generating sets worldwide. It is the only Indian manufacturer with an accredited hydro-turbine testing laboratory, and it won the E&M package for the 2,880 MW Dibang project - the country’s largest hydropower plant - in Arunachal Pradesh. - **Nuclear is a monopoly position** - BHEL is the sole Indian supplier of nuclear turbine generators and the only company associated with all three stages of India’s nuclear programme, holding a 59% domestic market share in nuclear power equipment. It received its largest-ever nuclear order for the turbine-island EPC package for six 700 MW indigenous pressurized heavy-water reactors, and has signed cooperation agreements with both NPCIL and France’s EDF to pursue future projects including small modular reactors. - **Services turn one-off projects into recurring income** - a dedicated spares and services group with twelve offices and nine service centres provides renovation, modernisation, and life-extension work for plants already in operation, and BHEL has an 87% market share in flexibilisation - retrofitting thermal plants to ramp up and down quickly so they can balance intermittent solar and wind on the grid. ## 2. Industry: the diversified engineering arm built on the same factory floors **The heavy-manufacturing skills and factories that build power plants also produce electric locomotives, naval guns, oil-rig equipment, and transmission systems - and this segment has grown to nearly a third of the business.** - **Railways is a breakthrough platform** - BHEL makes the electric propulsion systems, traction converters, and control electronics that move trains, and it won a landmark order as lead partner in a consortium to supply and maintain 80 Vande Bharat semi-high-speed trains, the first fully homegrown bidder to do so. It has already supplied over 850 locomotives to Indian Railways and is developing KAVACH, the indigenous train-collision avoidance system planned for 44,000 km of track. - **Defence is a five-decade moat** - since 1994, BHEL has been the sole supplier of the 76/62 mm Super Rapid Gun Mount, the main gun on Indian Navy warships, with 48 units delivered and orders for 38 upgraded versions that can fire programmable ammunition. It also makes compact heat exchangers for military aircraft, supplied batteries and propellant tanks for the Chandrayaan-3 moon mission, and has licensed technology from DRDO to manufacture fused-silica radar domes for missile seekers. - **Transmission connects the grid** - BHEL has supplied over 840,000 MVA of transmission equipment and executed six major HVDC projects, including India’s first high-voltage DC link in 1989 and the 800 kV, 6,000 MW link between the western and southern grids. It is now building terminal stations for another 6,000 MW HVDC corridor, Khavda-Nagpur, in partnership with Hitachi Energy. ## 3. New energy and clean technology: the green-engine under construction **BHEL is assembling a future beyond coal by commercialising in-house technologies - coal gasification for high-ash Indian coal, alkaline electrolysers for green hydrogen, and floating solar - and backing them with government-backed joint ventures and licensing deals.** - **Coal gasification is the homegrown wildcard** - BHEL has developed the world’s first proven pressurised fluidised-bed gasification technology that can handle high-ash Indian coal, something international technologies cannot do, and it has already built a pilot plant in Hyderabad. A joint venture with Coal India, called Bharat Coal Gasification and Chemicals Ltd, is now scaling this to a commercial 2,000 tonnes-per-day ammonium-nitrate plant, with BHEL receiving a ₹2,800 crore order for the syngas purification package. - **Solar plays where others do not** - BHEL has installed roughly two-thirds of India’s floating solar capacity and was in the final stages of commissioning the country’s largest floating plant (100 MW) at NTPC Ramagundam, building on reservoirs and saline backwaters where land is not an issue. It also makes space-grade solar panels and batteries for ISRO missions. - **E-mobility fills the charging gap** - BHEL has developed and certified 60 kW and 122 kW EV chargers in-house, installed 59 of them at BPCL petrol pumps, and won an order for 70 fast EV chargers (of 50 KW DC rating), while also supplying the sole Indian-made Li-ion batteries for next-generation combat aircraft. # Group structure and partners **BHEL is a single listed entity, 63% government-owned, that runs fifteen factories and a web of technology partnerships with global OEMs - it buys proven designs, then builds them in India.** - **Fifteen plants, five R&D centres** - manufacturing units span Bengaluru, Bhopal, Haridwar, Hyderabad, Trichy, and nine other locations, supported by a corporate R&D centre in Hyderabad and a welding research institute at Trichy that trains roughly 5,000 people a year. - **Three active joint ventures** - the coal-gasification venture with Coal India (49% BHEL), a gas-turbine services JV with GE (49.99%), and a power-projects JV with NTPC (50%), plus a joint venture stake in Raichur Power Corporation. - **Technology is licensed, not guessed** - key agreements include GE for gas turbines (now with rights to run on hydrogen and syngas blends), Sumitomo SHI FW for circulating fluidised-bed boilers, BARC for electrolyser and membrane technology, EDF for nuclear cooperation, and HIMA Middle East FZE, Dubai (a wholly owned subsidiary of HIMA Paul Hildebrandt GmbH, Germany) for railway signalling. - **Export footprint in 91 countries** - roughly 13 GW of power-generating capacity delivered outside India, with major projects under execution in Bangladesh (the 2x660 MW Maitree thermal plant), Bhutan, Nepal, and Nigeria, plus a recent ₹2,000-2,500 crore order for eight gas-turbine generator packages for the Dangote refinery in Nigeria.