New Delhi: NHPC Ltd has fully revived its 510 MW Teesta-V power station in Sikkim, bringing the plant's third and final unit back into commercial operation nearly three years after it was knocked offline by a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF). In a filing to the stock exchanges on Thursday, the state-run hydropower producer said the last of the station's three units, Unit#3 of 170 MW, resumed commercial generation from the small hours of July 16, restoring the plant to full capacity.
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NHPC informed the exchanges that Unit#3 was synchronised with the grid and began generating power from midnight on July 16. "Last Unit i.e. Unit#3 (170 MW) of Teesta-V Power Station (3 X 170 MW), Sikkim has resumed commercial generation as per scheduling of Power on 16.07.2026 (00:00 Hrs) after synchronisation with the grid. With this, Teesta-V Power Station (3 X 170 MW), Sikkim has resumed commercial generation of all its units," the company told the stock exchanges.
The development follows NHPC's earlier disclosure of July 13, when the first two units, Unit#1 and Unit#2 of 170 MW each, were restarted after grid synchronisation. At the time, the company had said the status of the third unit would be intimated in due course.
Commissioned in 2008 as a run-of-river scheme with diurnal storage on the Teesta river, the Teesta-V station had contributed nothing to NHPC's generation for two consecutive financial years after being battered by back-to-back natural disasters.
The plant was first crippled by the flash flood on the intervening night of October 3 and 4, 2023, triggered by the breach of the South Lhonak Lake in North Sikkim. The GLOF event also collapsed the upstream Teesta-III dam at Chungthang and caused widespread devastation downstream. NHPC had pegged the damage from that flood at Rs 1,075.97 crore.
Recovery was set back further by a landslide over the Tail Race Tunnel (TRT) outlet structure on August 20, 2024, which the company estimated caused material damage of Rs 327.67 crore.
NHPC pursued the rebuilding across multiple civil and hydro-mechanical work packages. During a site visit between November 2 to 4, 2025, CMD Bhupender Gupta reviewed the balance works and directed officials to bring the flagship station back into operation by the end of financial year 2025-26.
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The full restart has come a few months past that internal target. At NHPC's Q4 FY26 earnings call in May 2026, management had noted that Teesta-V's plant availability factor stood at around 75 percent and that the station had not contributed to generation in the preceding two fiscals, a drag that had weighed on the company's overall availability metrics. With all three units now back in service, that drag is set to ease.