There might be a blackout within the city within the next two days if coal supplies to power plants don’t improve, a Delhi minister said today. Delhi joins an extended queue of states including Tamil Nadu and Odisha that have raised concerns over long power cuts because of shortage of coal in power plants.
Over half India’s 135 coal-fired power plants, which in total supply around 70 per cent of the country’s electricity, have fuel stocks of but three days, data from the central grid operator showed, news organisation Reuters had reported earlier on.
“If coal supply doesn’t improve, there’ll be a blackout in Delhi in two days,” the national capital’s Power Minister Satyendra Jain said today. “The coal-fired power plants that offer electricity to Delhi should keep a minimum coal stock of 1 month, but now it’s come all the way down to in the future,” Mr Jain said.
“Our request to the centre is that railway wagons should be arranged and coal should be transported to the plants soonest. All the plants are already running in exactly 55 per cent capacity,” the minister in Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government said.
Mr Jain alleged the coal crisis appears to be “man-made, even as the crisis of medical oxygen supply during the COVID-19 second wave.”
“There is politics occurring. If you create a crisis, it’ll seem that some great work has been done by solving it,” the Delhi minister said.
Delhi encompasses a 1,300 megawatt (MW) gas-fired power station in Bawana on the city’s outskirts. “All three companies in Delhi are distributors and not power producers. we rely on the centre’s plants. If the provision doesn’t come, then after two days there’ll be a blackout within the whole of Delhi,” Mr Jain said.
A Reuters analysis of daily load despatch data from the central grid regulator showed India’s power supply deficit within the first seven days of October amounted to 11.2 per cent of the country’s total shortages throughout the year.
The data is publicly available but the analysis provides a primary concrete indication of the extent of the matter. Energy supplies are under strain globally as prices surge and demand and provide chains are strained by the recovery of consumption following lockdowns to contain the pandemic.
Mr Kejriwal today tweeted he has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his intervention in making adequate arrangements of coal and gas to power plants supplying electricity to the town. “Delhi could face an influence crisis. i’m personally keeping a detailed follow true. We are attempting our greatest to avoid it. within the meanwhile, I wrote a letter to Hon’ble PM seeking his personal intervention,” Mr Kejriwal tweeted.
