Centre plans to hook up states to idle power plants

The Centre is likely to offer about 8 GW of electricity to states for the medium to long term from projects that are idling as they don’t have coal linkages or purchase tie-ups, said people with knowledge of the matter. The Centre will aggregate demand from states facing power crises and then auction it to these stressed projects through tariff-based bidding.

The auctioned power purchase agreements will have coal earmarked to plants that emerge as the lowest bidders.