India can’t afford its coal addiction

India can’t afford its coal addiction

Opinion















Nothing makes you appreciate air-conditioning like high summer in India. In Delhi, temperatures are running over 100 degrees for much of the day, with two full months still to go before the cooling monsoon rains arrive. Unfortunately, just as everyone decided to crank up their ACs or at least their ceiling fans, electricity supply collapsed under the strain in large parts of the country.

This is not, sadly, a rare occurrence. It happens almost every summer and on other occasions when power demand spikes. There’s no clearer evidence that India’s electricity sector, dominated by coal-guzzling power plants and state-run utilities, simply isn’t up to the job. And the problem is only going to get worse: India has rapidly electrified in recent years and peak power demand has been growing between 8% and 10% a year.

The reasons for these successive power crises are almost always the same. Thermal power plants produce three-fourths of India’s electricity. But they can never seem to get their hands on enough coal.

Sometimes the generation companies can’t pay for coal shipments because they, in turn, have not been paid by India’s improvident electricity