Maharashtra is reeling under 4 to 12 hours of daily outage. The state-owned power generation company, Mahagenco, is unable to generate required power due to paucity of coal and the distribution company Mahavitaran facing huge shortages of 6,000 Mw has to buy additional costly power to plug the gap.
Speaking to Business standard, a senior official from Mahagenco said, “As we are getting coal only on a day-ahead basis to conserve the coal, we are not running our plants at its full capacity. Normally, during this time of year our generation is around 5,600 Mw as demand from agricultural sector increases due to the rabi season. However, due to scarcity of coal during non-peak hours, we are lowering generation between 4,800 and 4,900 Mw and during the peak hour we are increasing it from 5,100 Mw to 5,200 Mw.
A senior Mahavitaran official said, “To plug the gap created by lesser generation we have tied up 400 Mw but this power is available at Rs 9 to Rs 10 per unit which means our bill for 400 Mw for entire month is around Rs 300 crore whereas entire Mahagenco’s 5,500 to 6,000 Mw of power is available to us only at Rs 600 crore per month”.
“So if this situation persist then we will have no option but to approach the state power regulator and demand hike in tariff,” the official added.
Scarcity of coal started after the central government’s coal linkages committee in September allocated quarterly quota to Mahagenco which was less by 20 per cent of its requirement. As against the requirement of 3.2 million tonnes (mt), it got only 2.6 mt. Besides, it also advised to increase coal import from 1.51 mt per annum to 3.3 mt, said a senior official from the state energy ministry.
The reduction in coal allocation has not only hit the generation severely but it is also going to increase the cost of generation as imported coal is almost five times costlier. than domestic one, he added.