At a time when the country is reeling under a severe power shortage, as much as 24,353 MW of thermal power capacity is lying unused, because the plants are under repairs.
Of this, 13,204 MW of capacity has been under ‘forced outage’ for over 15 days, according to Daily Outage Report provided by the Central Electricity Authority.
Including plant shut-down due to ‘planned maintenance’ and ‘other reasons’, the total thermal capacity that remained unused on May 22 was 32,438 MW. This was 18 per cent of the thermal capacity of 176,836 MW that is monitored by CEA. (The total installed thermal capacity in the country is 199,627MW.)
As much as 12,330 MW was categorised under ‘major outage’.
The highest incidence of ‘forced outage’ is in the Western Region —7,040 MW. This is followed by the Eastern region (6,503 MW), Northern (5,755 MW) and Southern (4,731 MW).
Poor maintenance of the plants is the chief culprit. Three major reasons frequently appear in the list are - boiler miscellaneous problem, turbine miscellaneous problem and coal handling problem.
The Mahatma Gandhi Thermal Power Station in Haryana (600 MW), the Mundra TPS unit 6 (660 MW) and the Bhusawal unit 5 in Maharashtra (500 MW) are examples of projects shut down due to ‘major problems’ in boiler, turbine or coal handling plants.
It is not clear as to how the CEA classifies outages into ‘major’ and ‘minor’. The shut down of four units of 210 MW each of the Mettur Thermal Power Station after a fire damaged the coal handling plant is listed under ‘minor’. The plant will be out of operations for at least 20 days.