At his steel wire plant in Ludhiana, Badish Jindal has reported frequent power cuts lasting three to four hours. The city, in the northern state of Punjab, is among the places where homes and industries are enduring lengthy blackouts.
The immediate strain reaches far beyond one factory. Coal-fired stations provide about two-thirds of India’s electricity, leaving the power system exposed as heat has lifted demand and coal stocks have run down.
A record El Nino drove the weakest monsoon since 2015, reducing hydropower output. Hotter-than-normal weather also increased the need for air conditioning and farm irrigation, and electricity demand rose 9.5 per cent after an unusually hot summer and a weaker-than-normal southwest monsoon.
Then came a late burst of monsoon rain last month in coal-mining regions in the east. It curtailed coal production and hampered rail deliveries of fuel. Heavy rainfall in Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh disrupted mining and slowed transport from the mines.
The result has been a narrowing margin at the country’s power stations.
As of 24 September, 80 of 190 thermal plants had critically low supplies. Those plants held coal covering seven days, or just 37 per cent of their requirement, and overall coal stocks were down 49 per cent as compared to July and September 2023.
By 10 October, feedstock supplies at almost half of coal-fired plants had fallen to less than a quarter of required levels. The grid recorded an average shortfall of nearly four gigawatts a day during the first 10 days of October, an amount sufficient to power about 2 million rural Indian households.
Coal India has chosen to prioritise deliveries to generators connected to the grid. Large industrial customers in metals smelting, chemicals and paper have consequently been unable to obtain enough fuel to generate their own electricity.
In the central state of Chhattisgarh, where Manish Dhuppad is general secretary of the Chhattisgarh Mini Steel Plant Association, small steel mills are facing outages of 10 to 12 hours a day.
India plans to invoke an emergency law that would compel power plants using imported coal to generate electricity.
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