Despite the advertisement to mark the successive commissioning of 2,400 megawatt coal power plants in Thar, Central Power Purchasing Agency Limited ?(CPPA-G), a state-owned single buyer of electricity, cannot dispatch more than 75 percent of the aggregate capacity.
Due to transmission issues, only 1800 megawatt of the 2400 megawatt Thar power plants can be evacuated at any given time. Delay in constructing the second transmission line between Thar and Matiari Converter Station has resulted in the coal-based power plants sitting idle despite ranking highly on the merit order of efficient electricity producers.
The Central Power Purchasing Agency-Guarantee Limited wrote a letter to the National Transmission and Dispatch Limited (NTDC), asking to be updated about the progress and tentative commissioning date of the transmission line.
The letter says, “It is clear that in the present scheme, all four Thar coal power projects cannot be evacuated completely at once, which raises serious concern about power evacuation and the transmission capacity. The electricity demand will increase in the coming summer , but the full cheap-power evacuation from indigenous coal is impossible. The inadequacy of infrastructure has resulted in abnormal voltage and frequency fluctuations for Thar power plants on the sole dedicated transmission line.”
Electricity generation started in Thar with two coal-based plants of 330 megawatt by Engro powergen in Block-2, and Hub power, along with other shareholders, built two more power plants of 330 megawatt each in the same block. The Shanghai Electric built two power plants of 660 megawatt each in Block-1.
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About 2400 megawatt of the installed capacity of 2640 megawatt is dispatchable. But only one transmission line, which can carry up to 1800 megawatt, is currently available for the four projects. An energy expert commented that producing 600 megawatt on imported coal instead of Thar coal costs around $30 million monthly. Producing that much electricity through imported gas should cost $35 million in imports. ?