It is not unusual to spot mules carrying machinery up the treacherous roads of Jammu & Kashmir to help build infrastructure projects. Sometimes thousands in number, the mules are slow and prone to illness, protracting the project time frame by months if not years. Pratik Agarwal, Chairman, Resonia (erstwhile Sterlite Power) is about to change that.

The mega transmission project that would have required 5,000 mules to station 160 transmission towers in the state will now need none as the company is bringing in heavy-lift helicopters from American firm Erickson to airlift the towers to the mountainous regions. This is among the first few technology measures Agarwal is introducing to the company, which is in the process of demerging from Sterlite Technologies to avoid quarterly shareholder gaze. He has also tied up with Sharper Shape of Finland to fly drones to monitor grid disturbances, and with Burn & McDonnell to bring in new technology and design into transmission.

“I don’t think the next 30 years in power transmission will be anything like the last 30 years,” Agarwal told ET. “The problems of tomorrow will need investments in research and development, talent, patents and may be the use of new tools like big data analytics and virtual reality,” he said. According to Agarwal, lack of land to build new transmission towers, integration of renewable energy and rising grid outages due to climate change will be some of the biggest problems the power sector will face in the future. He said the only way to transcend these challenges is through the use of disruptive technology.

“When Mumbai doubles its power requirement, where are you going to build the lines? How will you integrate the large amount of renewable energy that is getting created at a lightening pace?” said Agarwal. Resonia partnered the US-based CTC to create high-performance conductors that allowed the company to replace low capacity wires with new wires of higher capacity in Delhi, increasing capacity substantially.

Agarwal expects the company to turn profitable by the end of this financial year as many projects are getting close to commissioning. Four out of nine projects are already commissioned and the company will look at equity divestments in them soon, he said.

Resonia, one of India’s largest power transmission players, has a debt of about Rs 4,200 crore, 70-80% of which is at project level. With equity divestments in projects debt is likely to go down. For the nine-month period ended December 31, 2015, the power business earned revenue of Rs 1,827 crore with an EBIDTA of R

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