Coal shortage: No power from 500MW unit

While power demand has peaked with summer setting in, the state-owned power generation utility has been unable to generate electricity from a 500-megawatt (MW) unit due to coal shortages.

The Maharashtra State Power Generation Company Limited (MahaGenco) has a total of 920MW of capacity under planned and forced outages.

Maharashtra's peak deficit was around 1,000MW on Sunday, slightly more than the capacity under outages.

After the declaration of commercial operations on a 500MW set at the Khaparkheda thermal power plant, the MahaGenco has a 6,980MW installed capacity in coal-based thermal power. But this set has been under forced outage due to coal shortage since April 21.

Another 210MW unit at Parli has also been under forced outage since April 9, while a 210MW set at Chandrapur is undergoing overhaul since March, and is also under planned outage, taking the total capacity under planned and forced outages to 920MW.

Admitting to the loss of generation due to coal shortage, a senior MahaGenco official said: “We have received a few rakes of coal for the 500MW set at Khaparkheda and generation was expected to commence soon after the stock was built up.”

The MahaGenco is also conducting trial runs on two generating sets of 500MW each at Bhusawal.

On Sunday, the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited had a morning peak demand of 14,374 MW, with the load-shedding being 1,082MW. The load-shedding in the evening and night was 972MW and 362MW respectively.

The thermal power generation by MahaGenco varied from 4,710MW in the morning to 4,917MW in the evening and 5,102MW at night.