Less coal supplies from Eastern Coalfields (ECL), Bharat Coking Coal ( BCCL) and Central Coalfields (CCL) have left 3 of the 7 Damodar Valley Corporation’s thermal power plants with no coal stocks at the plant heads. But the seven coal fired plants aggregating an installed capacity of 5,750 MW are having an average stock of more than 4 days.

The situation has happened since DVC’s 210 MW Durgapur thermal power station has stock of 25 days against its normative requirement of 20 days. Other plants including Bokaro TPS (500MW), Koderma TPS (1,000 MW ) and Durgapur Steel TPS ( 1,000 MW) have coal stocks of 3 days, 2 days and 1 day respectively. The 500 MW Chandrapura TPS, 2,340 MW Mejia TPS and the 1,200 MW Raghunathpur TPS have no coal stock at their plants.

Daily supplies to the power plants from the mines of ECL, BCCL and CCL are low and Mejia TPS has got the highest supply at 28,000 tonne a day, followed by Koderma at 15,000 tonne a day, Raghunathpur 10,000 tonne a day, Durgapur Steel TPS 7,000 tonne a day and Bokaro TPS 5,000 tonne a day as of October 25. Supplies have been stopped at Durgapur TPS since it has more stock than normative requirement.

A DVC official on the condition of anonymity said though all the seven TPS are located on the coal bearing areas, DVC has been one power company that has been hurt the most for shortage of coal. Jharkhand has been the worst affected state with maximum power outage since its supplies depend on DVC and NTPC generation. The three DVC plants in the state including Bokaro, Chandrapura and Koderma have not been generating enough to steadily supply power to the state.

According to the Centre’s instruction DVC had cleared its Rs 1,200 crore dues to Coal India (CIL) in September to get regular supplies of coal. But supplies have been chequered preventing the power generator to steadily produce power despite the power ministry’s given target in August of achieving 90% PLF from the 61% PLF the plants were operating at, the official said.

However, there were no plans of diverting coal from the 210 MW Durgapur TPS, having 25 days’ coal stock as of October 25, to DVC’s bigger thermal units, though coal stocks, according to the power ministry’s direction, were to be regulated at 26 TPS during September that had buffer stocks of more than 15 days. This was announced to free up 1,77,000 tonne of coal.

DVC has long term power purchase agreement with the state discoms of Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala and West Bengal.
Source: Financial Express