Amid coal supply crunch, govt reworks allocation plan

Summers have just begun and India is already staring at yet another coal crisis as power demand continues to soar with India recording a peak demand of 197,283 MW on Thursday.

While Thursday’s demand was not even the highest the country has ever seen, at least 3,000 MW of power demand could not be met on the same day, primarily owing to plants either being shut or running below their installed capacity due to coal shortage.

Taking note of the imminent crisis, the power ministry on Friday changed the methodology of how coal allocated to states could be used by private independent power generating stations (IPPs). It also tweaked the timeline of the bidding process, in an attempt to ease coal availability at power plants going ahead.