POWER Power ministry asks plants to reduce coal imports In a letter to power producers written the government has asked power plants which blend high quality imported coal with domestic fuel to “make best efforts to replace their imports with domestic coal”. Out of the 198.5 giga-watt (GW) of installed coal-based power plants more than 162 GW import coal for power generation. However, 144.6 GW of this capacity import coal for blending with the local variant, while 17.6 GW are designed to run specifically on imported coal. In FY20, power plants in the country imported 69.2 million tonne (MT) coal, up 12% annually. Of this, 45.5 MT were imported by plants designed to run on imported coal. In the wake of power demand slowing down due to muted industrial and commercial activities amid the lockdown to contain the coronavirus, power plants currently have coal stocks of about 50 MT which can sustain them for 30 days. Since power plants are not very keen to lift coal as of now, it raises the risk of Coal India’s (CIL) output coming down for the second year in a row.
10 | CCAI Monthly Newsletter April 2020
If power plants, at the government’s behest, agree to reduce imports then CIL’s FY21 production target of 710 MT might become achievable. Bucking the upward trend of several years, CIL’s output declined 0.8% annually to 602.1 MT in FY20.
Power procurement through exchange by distribution utilities yields significant savings: IEX The Indian Energy Exchange (IEX), an energy trading platform, has stated that it has witnessed heightened activity on exchange and the distribution utilities across India since the Covid-induced lockdown on March 25. While the peak demand declined by almost 25 per cent, the exchange has witnessed high sell side liquidity, which is almost at 2.7 times the demand side, which is helping to keep the price in the market under check. The average price in IEX day-ahead market has been as low as ₹2.36 per unit during March 24 to April 20. “The distribution utilities are meeting their seasonal demand as well as replacing their costlier
