New Delhi:
The country faces restrictions in the domestic availability of coal and the rest of the dry fuel demand must be met by imports, the Ministry of Coal said.
The ministry has also stressed that coal block keepers – both captive and commercial – have an important role to play in mitigating the coal shortage situation.
Domestic coal production is about 800 million tons, according to the additional secretary of the coal-fired power plant, who also chairs an inter-ministerial panel on coal connections for the electricity sector.
The inter-ministerial panel recently met to consider requests for coal interconnections to power plants in the central/government sector and to assess the status of existing coal interconnections.
The additional coal secretary stated that “there are restrictions in the availability of domestic coal and that domestic coal production is about 800 tons”.
“Therefore, the rest of the country’s demand for coal must be met by imports from other countries,” the minutes of the meeting on fuel connections said.
Coal Minister AK Jain had previously attributed low coal stocks at power plants to various factors, such as increased demand for electricity due to the boom in the economy after COVID-19, the early arrival of summer, a rise in gas prices and imported coal and a sharp decline in electricity generation from coastal thermal power plants.
He had added that a whole series of measures are already underway to improve the overall power supply in the country.
Gas-based electricity production, which has fallen dramatically in the country, has exacerbated the crisis.
Coastal thermal power plants are now generating about half of their capacity due to soaring prices of imported coal. This has created a gap between the supply and demand of electricity.
The secretary went on to say that states in the South and West have been dependent on imported coal.
And when domestic coal is shipped via wagons/rakes to the domestic coal plants in these states to offset the loss of imported coal generation, the rake lead time is more than 10 days, leading to rake availability issues for other plants.