DNA Exclusive: After coronavirus crisis, will coal shortage now plunge India into darkness?

New Delhi: As India suffers from major coal shortage in most of its power plants, there is a likely chance that the country may plunge into darkness in the next five to six months. The crisis has been spurred by a surge in demand, the scarcity in domestic supply and booming international prices. As India's economy recovers from the losses incurred due to the COVID pandemic, the demand for electricity has become more essential than the pre-COVID times.

Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary on Friday (October 8) analysed the coal shortage crisis how it started and its impact on India.

This power crisis started from China, gradually many countries in Europe and South America fell victim to it and now this crisis has made its way to India.

There is a huge deficiency of coal in many big power plants. As high as 70 per cent of electricity in India is still generated from coal which is used to generate power and then it is supplied to homes, offices and factories. Currently the worst situation is in Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

There are 135 power plants in India which run on coal of these, 107 power plants have coal reserves for the next five days or less. There are 28 such power plants whose coal supply can be depleted in the next 48 hours. These are the figures uptil Wednesday, taken from the website of Ministry of Power. The Ministry of Power has made it clear that this crisis may continue for the next five to six months. Therefore, people should be prepared. 

India has the fourth largest coal reserves in the world. But even in India, coal production is declining. Due to heavy rains last month, the mines could not function properly and India's domestic coal production also declined. And power plants could not accumulate coal. 

Generally, power plants keep coal safe for at least two weeks. But now most of the plants do not have even a week's worth of coal left. 

However, there is only one thing in favor of India and that is that winter is coming in India and generally the consumption of electricity in India decreases to some extent in winter. But the gap between demand and supply will probably not narrow so quickly.

Now, India has to find a solution because it will not only plunge millions of homes in India into darkness it will also have an effect on offices and factories and may even have to close offices and factories for some time.

If you are wondering about other countries and how tehy are struggling with power crisis, then here is whats happeing. Many factories have closed in China due to the shortage of coal and an unprecedented power crisis has arisen in South America. In the UK, soldiers are transporting oil tankers to petrol pumps as they face a huge shortage.

 

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