The water scarcity crippling large parts of India has already cost coal power companies nearly 7 billion units in lost electricity generation, with an estimated revenue loss of Rs 2,400 crore in the first five months of 2016 alone. Greenpeace India in its report released today said water shortages have led to coal power plant shut downs in West Bengal, Karnataka and Maharashtra.<\/p>\n
NTPC, Adani Power, GMR, MahaGenco and Karnataka Power Corporation are among the companies affected. Most of the losses have occurred between March and May, when plants have been unable to run due to a lack of water for cooling.<\/p>\n
Greenpeace India executive director Ravi Chellam said, “The coal power sector is already a water guzzler, consuming 4.6 billion cubic metres a year. Water that could have met the most basic needs of 251 million Indians. The expansion of coal power will increase air pollution and deforestation; this data shows us that it will also worsen the water crisis, posing a serious financial risk to lenders and investors in these projects.”<\/p>\n
Chellam said its report was based on daily outage reports from the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), and Right to Information replies from National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). He informed that the Greenpeace findings have been independently reviewed by equity analysts at the research firm Equitorials.<\/p>\n
Equity Analyst Jai Sharda, Founder of research house Equitorials, concurred with the results, saying “It’s clear that water scarcity can have a real impact on the profitability of coal power projects. Project lenders and shareholders alike should look carefully at this; the power sector cannot afford more stranded projects or non-performing assets.”<\/p>\n
According to the report, repeated shutdowns at NTPC’s Farakka plant between February and April resulted in lost generation of over 1 billion units of electricity, translating into lost revenue of Rs. 390 crore. Shutdowns at Adani’s Tiroda power plant in Maharashtra in May have cost the company 570 million units of electricity, with a value of nearly Rs 200 crore. For most of the month of May, over 4 GW of coal power was shut down due to unavailability of water.<\/p>\n
The Greenpeace report includes case studies of two regions where water scarcity poses a financial risk to new coal plants – Solapur in Maharashtra and the Krishna basin in Karnataka. NTPC’s Solapur power plant is facing commissioning delays due in part to uncertainty over water supplies. In Karnataka’s Krishna basin, NTPC’s Kudgi power plant and KPCL’s Raichur power plant were affected by lack of water this summer. More coal plants are being built in the water-stressed region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The water scarcity crippling large parts of India has already cost coal power companies nearly 7 billion units in lost electricity generation, with an estimated revenue loss of Rs 2,400 crore in the first five months of 2016 alone. Greenpeace India in its report released today said water shortages have led to coal power plant shut downs in West Bengal, Karnataka and Maharashtra. NTPC, Adani Power, GMR, MahaGenco and Karnataka Power Corporation are among the companies affected. Most of the losses have occurred between March and May, when plants have been unable to run due to a lack of water […]<\/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":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-power"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71325","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=71325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}