Coal India fully committed to supply its share of coal to power sector: Chairman
New Delhi, Jun 27 (PTI) Coal India Chairman Pramod Agarwal has said that the state-owned company is fully prepared to supply its share of coal to the power sector in the coming months. He also said that it would be important for power generating companies to build coal reserves in time.
Agarwal has said this with the onset of monsoon in many parts of the country.
It is worth mentioning that this year with increasing heat, people faced power crisis in many parts of the country due to shortage of coal in various thermal power stations.
In a conversation with PTI, Agarwal said, “It will be important to create fuel reserves in power plants at the time of availability of coal. We are taking all possible steps to supply our share of coal to the power sector in the coming months.”
The company aims to keep coal production at 35 million tonnes more in the first quarter of the current financial year than the corresponding quarter last year, he said.
“We will leave no stone unturned to increase production…,” Agarwal said.
On the recent shortage of coal, he said it was not “appropriate” to say. He said the company’s mine fields have about 46 million tonnes of coal, while the coal reserves in the power plants are around 24 million tonnes.
Apart from this, more than 60 million tonnes of coal is lying in areas like godowns, private washeries, ports. These have to be delivered to the power stations.
Agarwal said the demand-supply gap in recent months was due to three factors. First, with the economic revival after the pandemic, the demand for electricity increased rapidly. Second, the heat has increased significantly throughout the northern part of the country, increasing demand.
Third, the price of coal in the international market has been rising for the past few months. This avoided international coal-fired power plant fuel imports.
The chairman said, “The first quarter was very good for us. In the first two months of the current financial year, the production grew by about 29 per cent on a year-on-year basis and stood at 108 million tonnes. This is the highest ever production in this period.
Also the supply to the power sector stood at 102 million tonnes, an increase of 16.7 per cent.
Agarwal said that Coal India has set a target of 565 million tonnes of coal supply to the power sector in the financial year 2022-23 and the company is making efforts in this direction.
The share of Coal India in coal production in the country is more than 80 percent. The company is the largest supplier of coal to the power sector.
