The power ministry has issued dire warnings that thermal power plants, India’s main source of electricity, are running out of coal. According to the coal ministry, there is no scarcity of coal; the issue is a lack of available train rakes to transport coal. And, if anyone is wondering where all the rakes have gone, given that there was no desperate scarcity of rakes until lately, here’s why:
more domestic coal is being transported to the coastal power plants, which have both cut down generation and started demanding more of domestic coal, instead of using imported coal, to use which they came up along the coast and next to ports. When rakes are dispatched over longer distances from the pithead than they used to be, they take longer to come back empty, producing a shortage, in the meantime, of rakes for transporting coal to the power plants they supply in the normal course. And why have the coastal power plants started producing less power and importing less coal? The cost of imported coal has gone through the roof, thanks to the Ukraine war, assorted bans on Russian coal, and desperate scrambles to substitute Russian gas by burning more coal. India has the world’s fourth-largest reserves of coal and if we could get our act together, India would not need to import even a smidgeon of thermal coal (India would still need to import metallurgical coal, coking coal). But India does not have its act together in the coal sector.
