Union Power Minister RK Singh on Tuesday said the coal production will be hiked significantly to cope up with increased demand.
“On a day-to-day basis, our power demand is 40,000-45,000 MW more than the corresponding day the last year. Energy consumption has gone up from 3,500 million units to 4,500 million units,” he said.
The reserve stocks of coal came down from 24 million tonnes to 19 million tonnes in power plants on 30 April, they were further down to 18.5 million tonnes on 31 May, Singh said, adding that imports have started coming in.
India faced its worst power crisis in over six years in April due to higher electricity demand, despite record production by Coal India during the year ended March 2022.
Coal India has previously blamed lower output from import-based coal plants, adding that fewer imports put more pressure on domestic mining.
Indian officials are rushing to make more coal available for utilities as shortages in the July-September quarter are expected to be 15% wider than intitially estimated due to expectations of higher power demand.
The government has rolled back a policy to cut thermal coal imports and plans to reopen closed mines to address rising power demand. Coal accounts for nearly 75% of India’s power output and Coal India produces 80% of domestic coal.
“We were power deficit in 2014, but now we have surplus power. At that time, there was a shortage of 13-15% in power supply. We connected the entire country into one grid. Today, we can transfer 1.12 lakh MW of power from one corner of country to another,” Singh said.
“We constructed 2,900 new substations, upgraded 3,800 substations and added 7.5 lakh new transformers. We achieved the target of having 40% of our established power generation capacity from non-fossil fuels in November 2021.”
In order to further accelerate India’s ambitious renewable energy programmes, the government has notified Green Open Access Rules today.
For all the latest world News Click Here
