Built along a stretch of salt flats in southern India, the Tuticorin power plant epitomizes a quagmire for the world’s fastest-growing major economy: how to provide reliable energy to 1.4 billion people.
For starters, the 1,050-megawatt coal plant, one of the region’s largest, was supposed to shut down. Opened four decades ago, the facility is too cramped to install retrofits to meet the government’s pollution norms, prompting India’s power ministry to plan its closure by 2022. Yet the facility continues to run at full blast, clocking 90% utilization in February. Aging boilers guzzle coal from mines nearly 2,000 kilometers away — a transport distance that only adds to the nation’s emissions footprint.
