NTPC to operationalise 800 Mw at Odisha's Darlipalli power plant in FY19

Country’s largest thermal power producer NTPC Ltd plans to operationalise 800 Mw of its 1600 Mw (2x800) supercritical coal-based power plant at Darlipalli in Odisha's Sundergarh in the current financial year.

“The commissioning activities of 800 Mw are going on. The unit will be operational in the current financial year”, said a senior NTPC official.

By September 2019, the full capacity of 1600 Mw is projected to start producing power. The total cost of the project is pegged at Rs 125 billion.Odisha will get 50 per cent power of the total capacity.

The power major will source coal from its Dulanga coal mine to meet the raw material requirements. For additional requirements, it will source from Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd (MCL), a 100 per cent subsidiary of the Coal India Ltd (CIL). The NTPC project will consume eight million tonnes of coal annually.

Besides Odisha (800 Mw), West Bengal (423 Mw), Jharkhand (142 Mw), Sikkim (21 Mw) and Bihar (215 Mw) are beneficiary states of the upcoming project.

"The power purchase agreements (PPAs) with all the states are already in place", said the official.

NTPC presently has two projects running in the state- Talcher Thermal Power Station (460 MW) and Talcher Kaniha (3000 MW). It plans to phase out its 460 Mw plant of Talcher Thermal Power Station (TTPS) which has already completed 25 years.

TTPS was taken over by NTPC Ltd from Odisha State Electricity Board in 1995. The country's largest power producer also has plans to have a 1320 Mw (2x660Mw) supercritical plant at TTPS after the phasing out of the existing 460 Mw.

Recently, the Odisha government and NTPC have been at loggerheads over cancellation of PPAs. Faced with the prospect of a glut in thermal power supplies from 2020 onwards, the state government had written to the Union government to scrap PPA signed with NTPC projects which is due to start commercial operations.