Planting power

As summer scorches across India,people turn on fans and air conditioners,heavily increasing urban India’s consumption of power. The Delhi government expects a shortfall of over 400 MW daily in the summer months,and wrote to the power ministry asking for 300 MW over its usual allocation from May onwards for three months. One would think that this increase in demand would,in the course of things,lead to an increase in supply. Instead,electricity generation actually fell 22 per cent in April. Clearly,something is very wrong with the power sector.

Power plants blame it mostly on coal. The Confederation of Indian Industry warned as early as February that “32 power stations had coal stock to last for less than seven days,while 18 had stocks enough for less than four days,against a normal stockpile for about 21 days”. The government recently had to revise its own estimates of coal shortage till March 2012 upwards to 112 million tonnes,up from 83 million tonnes that it had estimated in December 2010. Naturally,there are important short-term measures that could be taken. For example,industry wants coal set aside for electronic auctioning to be passed on to plants with “guaranteed” supplies,at the price previously discovered through the auctions. Such measures must be seriously considered.

The larger problem,however,continues to be that we do not seem to think far enough ahead about the power demands of our growing economy. Much has been made about the environment ministry’s obstructionism about opening up new forested sectors to coal exploration,and that is a decision that must be made only after taking into account the needs of the coal and power sectors. Yet,opening up more sectors to domestic coal exploration is hardly a solution unless the structural problems already in place,which prevent the coal we already have access to being properly utilised,are not addressed. One such: many Indian thermal power plants cannot burn combinations of domestic and high-grade,imported coal in an economically sensible proportion. We need investment to overcome that. But,above all,the problem is one of transportation. The railways have failed to manage the demand for coal,with 50 million tonnes of coal lying at mine pitheads untransported. Ports are unable to handle the quantum of imports we need. Unless the transport infrastructure is upgraded,we will continue to pay too much for power,and receive too little of it.