Coal imports fell 11% to 19.3 million tonne in July from a year earlier – the sharpest and the first drop in more than a year – as local supplies rose and money losing power generators held up purchases, commodities trader mjunction said.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been credited with the turnaround in output by state-run Coal India , but he is now grappling with power distributors that are so deep in debt that they can’t pay to buy power from generators.<\/p>\n
Power generators, as a result, are operating both below their capacity and last year’s levels.<\/p>\n
“The demand for electricity from distribution companies is not growing the way it was projected to grow,” mjunction Chief Executive and Managing Director Viresh Oberoi said in an email.<\/p>\n
“The poor financials (of distribution companies) that reduced their purchasing capacity is also one of the reasons for lower-than-expected electricity generation.”<\/p>\n
India, the world’s third largest buyer of foreign coal, imported 20% less of thermal coal used in power generation in July from a year ago, according to provisional data from mjunction.<\/p>\n
The last fall in total coal imports was in April 2015.<\/p>\n
Oberoi expects thermal coal imports to fall further, a prediction likely to cheer Coal Secretary Anil Swarup, who told Reuters late in July imports will come down “dramatically” in the next two to three months.<\/p>\n
Coal and power minister Piyush Goyal forecast imports will slide 3% in the year to next April, to 210 million tonnes, but government officials said actual purchases could be much lower.<\/p>\n
Government data on coal imports generally lags and varies from data from private firms such as mjunction, which collects information from more ports and includes additional coal grades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Coal imports fell 11% to 19.3 million tonne in July from a year earlier – the sharpest and the first drop in more than a year – as local supplies rose and money losing power generators held up purchases, commodities trader mjunction said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been credited with the turnaround in output by state-run Coal India , but he is now grappling with power distributors that are so deep in debt that they can’t pay to buy power from generators. Power generators, as a result, are operating both below their capacity and last year’s levels. “The demand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}