Tata Power Brand Guidelines: A 1910 Bombay Hydro Scheme, Trombay & the Mundra Plant

Monsoon rain stored in the Western Ghats.

Tata Power grew out of a hydroelectric scheme for Bombay. The Tata group’s own history says Jamsetji Tata had been interested in water power since 1875, and that he took up a plan, first put to him by the engineer David Gostling, to store monsoon rain in the Western Ghats near Lonavla and use it to drive the city’s mills in place of coal. Preliminary work had begun under him, and the scheme was carried through by his sons, Dorabji and Ratan Tata.

Three companies were formed: the Tata Hydro-Electric Power Supply Company in 1910, the Andhra Valley Power Supply Company in 1916 and the Tata Power Company in 1919, the Tata group says; together they were known as the Tata Electric Companies. English Wikipedia dates the first hydro station, at Khopoli, to 1915. Bhivpuri followed, built in a single phase from 1916 to 1922 with a dam at Thokerwadi, and Bhira was the third, which the group dates to 1927 and English Wikipedia to 1922.

The group says the early companies offered to buy old steam engines from Bombay’s mills to encourage them to switch to hydroelectric power. A century on, Bhivpuri, Khopoli and Bhira, all in Raigad district, form what the group described in 2022 as Mumbai’s “islanding system,” the backup source that takes over when the city’s supply is disrupted, and Bhivpuri’s output still goes to Mumbai under a power purchase agreement. Water released from the three stations also feeds the Ulhas, Patalganga and Kundalika rivers, the group says.

The three companies were combined in 2000, when the other two were amalgamated into the Tata Power Company, according to the Tata group.

From Western Ghats hydro to Trombay and Mundra.

From hydro the company moved into thermal power at Trombay, on the edge of Mumbai, where the Tata group says it installed India’s first 500 MW unit and the first flue-gas desulphurisation plant at an Indian power station; it also credits Tata Power with India’s first 150 MW pumped-storage unit, at Bhira. English Wikipedia lists its other thermal stations at Jojobera and Maithon in Jharkhand, Kalinganagar in Odisha and Haldia in West Bengal; Maithon is a 74:26 joint venture with the Damodar Valley Corporation.

The largest is at Mundra, in the Kutch district of Gujarat, and is separate from Adani Power’s plant at Mundra. Tata Power won the ultra mega power project through competitive tariff bidding in 2006 and set up Coastal Gujarat Power Ltd to build it, English Wikipedia says; it has five 800 MW supercritical units burning imported coal, with boilers from Doosan and turbines from Toshiba. The Tata group calls it the country’s first 4,000 MW ultra mega power project; PTI gave its capacity as 4,150 MW in 2026. A change in Indonesia’s coal pricing rules in 2010 left the plant’s bid tariffs short of its fuel costs, and Tata Power took the matter to the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, English Wikipedia says.

The recent history is dated. Tata Power suspended all units at Mundra on 2 July 2025 and restarted them on 1 April 2026 under directions from the Ministry of Power under Section 11 of the Electricity Act, PTI reported in June 2026, when those directions were extended to 30 September. The plant supplies Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. In July 2026 BusinessLine reported that a revised supply agreement had been signed with Gujarat while talks with the other four states continued. By 31 October 2026 the directions had been extended to 31 December 2026, and approvals from the other procuring states were still awaited, according to a DSIJ summary of a Motilal Oswal report; those agreements were not completed at the time of writing.

Design and documentation.

Electricity utilities in Asia rarely sell a product people can hold, so their public image is built from places and services. The most common picture is the city at night: a skyline of lit towers seen across a harbour, offered as proof that the supply works. Out of town the pictures change to substations, transmission pylons striding over paddy fields and hills, and power stations set on coasts and islands.

Much of the visible design work now sits on screens. Customer-service apps and web pages handle accounts, bills, payments and outage notices, and many utilities also run electric-vehicle charging services and reward schemes inside the same apps. The bill itself is a design object: a page of tariffs, fuel charges and usage graphs that households read every billing period.

Campaigns are the other public face. Energy-saving drives, school programmes and community events give a utility a friendlier voice than its engineering does, and they often carry the brand into kitchens, classrooms and housing estates. Alongside them sit transition plans, with dates for running down coal-fired units, adding gas, wind or solar capacity and reaching longer-term climate targets, usually presented as timelines and charts.

The most complete record of how these companies see themselves is often the annual report. For listed and state-owned utilities alike it gathers the plants, the networks, the customer numbers and the plans in one document, with photography and typography chosen to match. The guides in this group look at the history behind each name, and at how that history shows up in the way the company presents itself today.

Solar, storage and charging points under a group name.

Renewables are a growing part of the business. The Tata group gives Tata Power’s generation portfolio as 16,716 MW across thermal, hydro, waste-heat recovery, wind and solar, of which 7,856 MW is clean and green capacity, and says its transmission and distribution businesses serve more than 13.1 million customers. Through TP Solar it makes solar cells and modules, and English Wikipedia places a module plant in Tamil Nadu. The group also lists rooftop solar, EV charging, pumped-storage projects at Bhivpuri and Shirwata, and hydro projects in Bhutan among its current work. In Delhi, English Wikipedia says, a Tata Power distribution company serves the north of the city.

Tata Power is listed on BSE and the National Stock Exchange, and its head office is in Mumbai. Tata group companies held 32.46% of the shares in December 2023 and the Life Insurance Corporation of India 12.90%, English Wikipedia says. Its managing director and chief executive is Praveer Sinha, BusinessLine reported in July 2026.

The company calls itself India’s largest integrated power company, present across the whole value chain from generation to distribution; that is its own description.

For a design guide, Tata Power shows how a century-old hydro story can carry a group name into solar panels and charging points. Compare NTPC, the state-owned generator incorporated in 1975, and CLP, the Hong Kong electricity company. For this guide we use a Western Ghats green, a reservoir blue and a pale mist with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tata Power’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.