Patiala: Buoyed by the financial gains made by selling surplus power worth Rs 976 crore in the open market from April till October, the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) has put in place a plan to further augment its power generation capacity by another 1,000 MW. 

It will conduct an 800 MW supercritical thermal power unit at the Ropar thermal power plant. It will also convert one of the 210 MW units at the Bathinda thermal power plant, which is shut down, into bio-mass unit to help farmers find a viable solution to stubble burning.

This year the PSPCL had managed to sell 1,800 million units of power in the open market at Rs 5.4 a unit. Last year, the corporation had managed to sell power worth Rs 445 crore.

Chairman and managing director of the PSPCL Baldev Singh Sran said that it had been planned to replace the two units at the Ropar thermal power plant with an 800 MW thermal units that would be commissioned with power efficient supercritical technology. Besides, one of the thermal units at the Bathinda thermal power plant, that had been shut down as it had outlived its age, would be converted to use crop stubble as fuel to generate power and in turn, provide a suitable alternative to the farmers to the problem of dealing with the stubble. This would also mitigate the effects of air pollution caused by the burning of crop residue in the field.

While the cost of power generation at state-owned plants at Bathinda, Ropar and Lehra Mohabbat is Rs 3.62, Rs 3.82 and Rs 3.60 per unit, respectively, the cost of power at private plants at Rajpura, Talwandi Sabo and Goindwal Sahib is Rs 2.29, Rs 2.77 and Rs 2.97 per unit, respectively, as these have been built with supercritical technology.

An 800 MW unit at Ropar could further bring down the cost of power by at least Rs 1 a unit that could have a multiplying effect on the total savings of the power corporation, which till April, was struggling with its finances and was unable to even pay the salaries.

Meanwhile, the PSEB Power Engineers’Association has been maintaining that the new state-owned thermal power plants built with supercritical technology could help Punjab in reducing its dependence on independent power producers, both within and outside the state, to meet its power requirements.

The proposal to commission a 1,320 MW project at Mukerian was proposed but later on, it was decided that state would construct three 800 MW supercritical units at Ropar. However, this proposal was also shelved as the state became power surplus with the commissioning of three private power plants at Rajpura, Talwandi Sabo and Goindwal.

But the All India Power Engineers’ Federation is demanding that the Punjab government should reconsider its decision to shut down the four units of the Bathinda thermal plant units that had been renovated at a cost of Rs 700 crore in accordance with the guidelines of Central Electricity Authority (CEA), further extending its life by 10 years. 

Chief patron of engineers’ federation Padamjit Singh said that the high cost of power generation at the state-owned thermal units can now be brought down with the re-operationalization of the Pachhwara captive coal mine that was allotted to Punjab in March 2015. According to him, it would bring an annual saving of Rs 650 crore for the PSPCL