Coal India To Ramp Up Supplies To Power Plants

Country's largest producer of dry fuel, Coal India Limited (CIL) has said that it will ramp up supplies to power companies, to boost their depleting stocks as several plants across the country face acute shortage of coal.

In a statement, the Maharatna entity said that in the last three days, it has increased offtake to power plants to 1.4 million tonnes on a daily basis and supplies are being augmented to power plants on a “mission mode”.

“CIL has taken up this on a mission mode. Availability of coal and subsequent supplies will be ramped up. Supplies to coal-fired plants from October onwards are aimed at 1.5 million tonnes per day going beyond 1.6 million tonnes in due course,” CIL Director (Marketing) S N Tiwary said.

The company expects that this measure will help ensure some sort of normalcy among stocks of power plants across the country.

In August, due to a rise in power generation, coal demand had peaked, which had led to demand overtaking supplies and coal stocks had rapidly depleted in power plants.

However CIL said that despite challenges due to monsoon at that time, it had supplied 243 million tonnes of dry fuel to power plants during the April-September period.

The offtake was an all-time high recorded by the company for that particular time period for any year.

During April-September of the corresponding period, 196 million tonnes of coal had been supplied to power utilities.

 “Compared with Covid-19-free period of April-September 2019, the growth was over 11 per cent when the supplies stood at 218 million tonnes,” the CIL statement said.