Railway minister Piyush Goyal's clear instructions to the railway officials, emphasising on the need to ensure the safe running of trains, have had an unexpected fallout. It has affected the coal supply, which in turn has led to power shortage in Maharashtra.
Ever since Goyal, on August 30, gave a freehand to railway officials to carry out mega blocks for safety-related works, all train services have been affected. This has also affected the goods trains, carrying coal to the power plants.
The goods trains have not been able to complete their usual routine over the last few days because of the safety works being carried out on tracks.
There are more than 2.5 lakh wagons in the Indian Railways, of which every fifth day a wagon is loaded.
This has increased over the past few days because of the slow movement of trains. Each wagon carries around 4,000 tonnes of coal. Due to this delay, there is coal shortage in power plants. The stock reserves are also depleting as the goods trains are not reaching the power plants in time.
Officials from Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) said the number of rakes carrying coal had come down to 15-20 rakes per day, which usually used to be 30 rakes. This has improved to 25-27 rakes over the last couple of days. However, the level of coal availability is not yet satisfactory.
"The quantum of coal maintained as buffer stock is for 21 days. But it varies between 3-14 days at various power plants," said a MSEDCL official. Sources said the coal reserves as on October 11 at Paras and Bhusawal power plants have barely 3 days. Meanwhile, Dahanu power plant of Reliance Infrastructure has 9 days of coal left in their stock as of October 8.
The state distribution company has power plants with installed capacity of 38000MW. However, in the first week of October, the demand crossed 18000MW. "Earlier this March, we easily managed 23500Mw demand when there was no issue of coal supplies.
Now the situation is improving," said MSEDCL official. On October 8, CM Devendra Fadnavis had asked the electricity distribution companies to restore power supply at places facing load shedding within a week.
Meanwhile, a Reliance Energy spokesperson said, "Despite coal shortage and high power demand during the peak season of October, we have been able to effectively mitigate the problem and are smoothly running our Dahanu Power Plant to ensure continuity of power supply to our customers. In addition, we have long-term PPA from Butibori plant and tied up for firm bilateral contract power. We are also procuring balance requirement from the day ahead market to ensure uninterrupted power to suburban Mumbaikars. We are confident that our customers will enjoy 24x7 uninterrupted power in the scorching heat of October."
