The future of thermal power plant especially coal based, will be in a not favourable position, I reckon.
Main reason- Environmental impact due to the emissions from fuel used, shortage of high quality fuel (low moisture content), scarcity of water & its quality.
We are well aware about the Conference of Party (COP21) Summit held recently in Paris. Their the talking point is all about global warming & minimising the greenhouse gases. For this they recommended avoid utilising excessive power from carbon footprints like Coal based powerplant and prefer renewable power viz. Solar Energy, Wind Power etc.
In order to meet the environment target benchmarked in the COP 21 meet, India should minimise the particulate matter from powerplant or they should go for non conventional way of getting power.
Our Government of India has already set a stringent norms for the emissions from powerplant. For the green bid they have modified the standards from earlier one.
1) The new standards are aimed at reducing emission of PM10 (particulate matter), Sulphur Dioxide, and Oxide of Nitrogen, which will in turn help in bringing about an improvement in the Ambient Air Quality (AAQ) in and around thermal power plants
2) In case of PM10, the new plants (Installed after Dec 31, 2016) will have to restrict the emission to 30 mg per cubic meter as compared to 100 mg per cubic meter in older plants.
3) Similarly, in case of SO2 and NOx, the new plants will have to restrict the emission at 100 mg per cubic meter as compared to 600 mg per cubic meter of the older plants, irrespective of the installed capacity of the power generating unit.
Now in order to meet this norms Power suppliers will invest/ cautious in spending more in sophisticated pollution control equipments. The cost of power generation may increase.
Also power producers may think of switching over from sub critical boiler pressure to super critical boiler pressure for maximizing the efficiency. This needs technological advancements (Engineering level) & huge investments in special materials for manufacture of boiler & its auxiliaries.
Hence switching over to renewable energy will be in increasing trend. But they (renewable energy) wont fulfil our energy demand completely.
Ya true. But we have to replace 65% of renewable energy with existing thermal power plants in order to completely nullify the coal dominance. But it will not be a easy task in country having 17% power deficit in avg. Things to remember, still solar power is costlier by 200 to 300% of thermal power due to not having proven Indian technology for parabolic ones. Touch time ahead., But phase changing time for thermal sector.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree with you. But the transformation has begun.
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