Panipat Plant
Inferior coal hits power generation
Manish Sirhindi
Tribune News Service

Panipat, October 5
Poor quality coal at the Panipat thermal plant has hit the power generation at this 1,350 MW power facility in the district. Coal is supplied to the plant by Indian Coal Mines (ICM). The authorities of the power plant have already sent formal commune to the management of the ICM seeking supply of better quality coal to run the eight units here.

According to sources, the coal, which is being used here, produces less heat and thus affects the efficiency of the plant. The staff has to use oil along with the coal to produce enough heat to run the units. This also increases the generation cost of electricity.

All eight units of the power plant uses coal as fuel, which is procured from coal mines in Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Maximum coal that reaches here comes from Bihar and Jharkhand.

As of today, the first unit of plant which is of 117 MW capacity is generating 108 MW of power, while the second, third and the fourth units, which are of 110 MW each, are generating 8,174 and 74 MW power, respectively, which is far less than the set targets. The fifth and sixth units of the plant are of 210 MW each and the seventh and eighth units are of 250 MW each.

Sources said the sixth and seventh units generally generated up to 220 MW of power while the eighth unit, which at present is under maintenance, generated up to 260 MW of the power.

However, as the quality of coal is poor, the generation in these units was far less than expected, sources said.

The power station had broken all previous records by achieving a record generation of 228.12 lakh units of power at PLF of 103.32 per cent in a single day on November 12 last year, which was the highest ever since it was commissioned. It had bettered its own record of power generation of 226.78 lakh units achieved on November 9, the same year as it had generated around 1,35,000 more units of electricity in a single day.

Sources said good quality coal could definitely improve the performance of the plant and it could again meet the record that was set last year.