Union Home Minister Amit Shah, on Monday, met both coal and power ministers to take stock of the power cuts across the country and the coal shortage causing it.
The hour-long meeting was attended by top officials from the ministries and senior officials from the state-run energy conglomerate NTPC Ltd, in addition to electricity minister R K Singh and coal minister Prahlad Joshi. While the coal ministry sought to calm fears of power outages, the Central Electric Authority's latest daily report revealed that 115 of the country's 135 thermal power plants are currently running on coal inventories that are less than a week old. 96 of these plants, which provide 71 per cent of the country's total thermal power, have coal reserves of four days or fewer.
A comfortable stock depends on the distance between the power plant and the type of coal it utilises (pithead or non-pithead).
“Many of our thermal power units are shut due to coal shortage. But in a day or so the power situation should improve,” said Punjab State Power Corporation chairman A Venu Parshad. Some rural parts in UP have been facing power outages for five-six hours due to a deficit of over 1,000 MW,
At a time when the economy is growing up and electricity demand is increasing, most of India's coal-fired power facilities have critically low coal inventories.
According to government data, 80 per cent of India's 135 coal-fired power plants had less than 8 days of supplies left as of October 6, with more than half of those having supplies worth two days or less.
Hetal Gandhi, director of research at ratings company CRISIL, a subsidiary of S&P Global told CNBC the average coal inventory held by power plants over the last four years was roughly 18 days' worth of supply.
Delhi's chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the weekend, warning that the capital "may suffer a blackout" unless power stations received extra coal. Power outages have lasted up to 14 hours in states like Rajasthan, Jharkhand, and Bihar.
In Maharashtra, 13 thermal power facilities were shut down, and residents were asked to use electricity carefully, while in Punjab, three power plants were shut down. Protests erupted in Punjab as a result of scheduled power outages that can last up to six hours.
Experts have stated that the power outages are not caused by a lack of domestic coal production, as some have claimed.
Over the past two decades, domestic coal production in India has continued to rise exponentially.
Energy providers have been accused of failing to stockpile sufficient amounts
to meet a plausible rise in demand.
Kerala faces a 300-400 MW power shortage due to decreasing coal supplies. To avoid load shedding, the Pinarayi government has decided to purchase expensive power from the exchange.
Few states have escaped the crisis, and Telangana should consider itself fortunate because it has the Singareni coal fields. It has enough thermal units in stock to last for the next 15 days. "Because we have Singareni, we have ample stocks," a senior TS Genco official explained.
Odisha, too, is in a good spot, with plenty of supplies. In any case, it is a power surplus state. Tamil Nadu has enough coal to last seven days.
Vibhuti Garg, a lead India economist for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told the Guardian, that there had been significant growth in electricity demand recently, as India had re-emerged from the Covid lockdown, but added that this had been anticipated months ago, so should not have taken
power companies by surprise.
The strong monsoon rains of this year have also been blamed for disrupting domestic coal mining by causing floods and preventing coal from being dispatched from mines.
While this is not unusual, extra coal is normally imported to make up for the shortfall in production. However, due to a global energy crisis that has seen international prices reach record highs, importing more coal has been more of a financial burden, resulting in bigger shortages than usual.
