Centre pours cold water on Uttarakhand thermal plant plan

Rejects state's bid for coal block allocation, says its power scenario better than that of other applicants

Uttarakhand’s quest to look for the possibility of setting up a thermal power plant has received a setback after the Centre rejected its bid for coal blocks.

The state government had requested the centre for allocating coal blocks to Uttarakhand Jal Vidyut Nigam (UJVN), the state-run power generating firm. But the bid was rejected on the ground that the power scenario in the hill state was better than all those states which had also applied for such coal blocks to their respective PSUs. “Our bids had been rejected,” said G P Patel, Managing Director of UJVN.

Patel said the government will again apply for the coal allocation as and when the bidding starts.

After the scrapping of a series of big hydel projects, Uttarakhand had been exploring the possibility of setting up a thermal plant outside the hill state.

For setting up the thermal plant, UJVN was looking for an opportunity to set up a 2,000 Mw plant in Jharkhand with an investment of Rs 12,000 crore.

For this purpose, Patel had travelled to Ranchi to hold talks with the top officials of the Jharkhand State Electricity Board to explore the possibility of forming a joint venture for the proposed thermal power plant.

With the hydropower sector taking a beating owing to closure of a series of big hydel projects, UJVN, with installed capacity of 1,306.25 Mw, has already entered into a joint venture with GAIL to set up two gas-power plants at Kashipur and Haridwar.

An investment of Rs 2,500 crore is proposed in the two plants with a capacity of 350 Mw each.

But the state has not yet got gas from the centre.

UJVN is also looking for capacity addition target of 582 Mw (2 large and 18 small hydel projects) by the end of 12th plan aggregating the installed capacity of the company to 2608 Mw.