Power ministry urges coal ministry to nudge CIL, SCCL to scale up output by 10-12%

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The Power Ministry has urged the ministry of coal to take steps for increasing output by 10 to 12 per cent from Coal India Ltd and its arm Singareni Collieries Company Ltd (SCCL) this fiscal year as electricity outages are hurting economic revival. "Power ministry has asked the coal ministry to raise CIL's and SCCL's output for the power sector by at least 10-12 per cent in the current financial year to ensure uninterrupted power supply and prevent any outages that could hurt country's economic revival," a source said.

The source also informed that power ministry has informally taken this matter up with coal ministry and a formal communication in this regard will be made soon. Coal stocks at 155 non-pit head thermal plants with total capacity of 164GW were 25 per cent of the normative level on May 23, 2022. The stock is being monitored by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA).

According to the CEA data, the 155 plants with over 164GW generation capacity, had coal stock of 14,233 thousand tonnes against normative level of 57,195 thousand tonnes. Coal is transported from mines to non-pit head thermal plants located hundreds of kilometers away.

The sources told that while coal production from power sector's captive mines is expected to go up by 43 per cent to 120 million tonnes in the current financial year, the output from CIL and SCCL is likely to go up by only 4-6 per cent. For FY22 the CIL provided 540 million tonnes of coal to the power sector while SECL provided another 53.65 million tonnes.

According to projections, coal dispatches to power sector are expected at 565 million tonnes by CIL and 57 million tonnes by SCCL in the current financial year. It is observed from the data that while captive coal mines of power sector have made efforts to raise production by as much as 40 per cent in the current financial year, the mining firms under coal ministry should raise output by at least 10 to 12 per cent to iron out supply crunch, the sources added.