CESC draws up plan to shut very old power generating stations in Bengal

Kolkata: Power utility CESC Ltd is drawing up a plan to close down very old and expensive power generating stations in West Bengal. The company, which is close to commissioning a 600 megawatt (MW) power plant at Haldia, is likely to prepare a blueprint within the next 10 weeks to phase out some archaic power generating units in the state, chairman Sanjiv Goenka said. 

“The planning of the new Haldia unit was done with the thought that some of these old units will be eventually closed down,” Goenka said. Any decision in this regard would be taken in “consultation with all relevant stakeholders, including the ministry and the regulator”, he said. All power plants that completed 25 years of operation needed to be replaced by new and environment friendly ones, Union power minister Piyush Goyal said in the Lok Sabha in August. Some of CESC’s old power stations are located on prime land within Kolkata’s city limits. 

The New Cossipore plant, which now has a generating capacity of just 125 MW and operates only when CESC’s demand reaches its peak during the day, is located on prime northern Kolkata land. The cost of producing power at the plant, built in 1949, is Rs.9 per unit—way above the average production cost of CESC, a company official said. He didn’t want to be named. “The unit is still running only to meet emergency demand and would become redundant when the Haldia plant becomes fully operational,” this person said. Another power plant at Titagarh was also built decades ago and has a production capacity of 240 MW. 

The Haldia plant, being run in technical collaborations with China’s Shanghai Electric Co. and Punj Lloyd Ltd, will supply power to CESC’s customers in Kolkata. With the peak daily demand of the city expected to rise to over 2,500 MW in the next five years, up from about 2,050 MW now, CESC could look at adding another generating unit at the existing Haldia land, Goenka said. “It always makes economic sense to expand at existing units,” he said. The first phase of the Haldia plant will begin generating power within a few weeks followed by the second unit likely in February, he added.

Source:livemint