Stating that “any fear of coal stocks depleting at the power plant end is erroneous”, the Union coal ministry said on Sunday that although coal stock at power plant’s is currently about 7.2 million tonne (MT), another 43 MT of coal — equivalent to demand of 24 days — is lying at Coal India (CIL) mines and is being supplied to the power plants. The Union power ministry said that coal despatch already exceeded the consumption on Saturday, with supply of 1.92 MT against consumption of 1.87 MT.
As much as 1,36,159 mega-watt (MW) of power plants in the country were running with coal stocks for eight days or less, leading to speculations of widespread electricity supply shortage in the country. While the daily average coal requirement at the power plants is about 1.9 MT in April-September, the daily supply has been around 1.8MT tonne per day due to extended monsoons constraining coal despatches. CIL aims to ramp up coal supply to power plants to 1.6 MT per day by October-end and supply from SCCL and captive coal blocks are seen to contribute another 0.3 MT of coal every day. CIL has also been supplying about 0.3 MT daily to non-power industries such as aluminium, cement and steel to meet their demand, the government said.
