The state government’s proposed decision to hand over the operation and maintenance of Damodaram Sanjeevaiya Thermal Power Station at Nellaturu in SPSR Nellore district on a 25-year lease to a private player has run into bad weather and the move was strongly opposed by the employees and opposition parties. Is.
“We will fight tooth and nail against the power sector policy of the state government. We will involve all employees’ organizations and like-minded opposition parties for this purpose,” said Center for Indian Trade Unions state president Ch. Narasimha Rao.
State-owned Andhra Pradesh Generation Corporation (APGENCO) likened the Jagan Mohan Reddy government’s decision to “sell a cow to buy milk,” said Mr Narasimha Rao, who is a part of the struggle against the privatization of the Visakhapatnam steel plant by the Centre. lead, said. Generated electricity at a highly competitive cost of ₹3.14/kWh at a time when the state government bought electricity at a very high cost by participating in online power auctions.
It was because of the “wrong policies” of the government that the plant was operating well below its capacity, AP State Power Employees Joint Action Committee chairman P. Chandrashekhar, who leads engineers, employees and contract workers to a protracted struggle.
The first unit of the plant, also known as Krishnapatnam Thermal Plant, came into existence in March 2014 with a capacity to generate 800 MW of electricity and the second unit with a capacity of 800 MW in March 2015. The third unit of 800 MW got its approval. during the last Chandrababu Naidu regime and is nearing completion.
However, with its own substantial coal reserves and issues related to imported coal, the 2×800 MW power plant equipped with supercritical boilers now performs well below its power generation capacity and is all set to go into the hands of a private player. The one who rules settled in the east coast.
The power plant, funded by the Power Finance Corporation and Germany’s KfW Bank, is designed to produce electricity from a mixture of 70% domestic coal and 30% imported coal, using sea water for cooling. But the poor quality of imported coal adversely affected power generation at the power plant, regretted TDP politburo member Somireddy Chandramohan Reddy.
Over one lakh tonnes of ‘substandard’ imported coal remained unusable. He said that the power plant authorities did not find any taker even for half the price he had bought, adding that the responsibility for the huge financial loss caused to the power plant was yet to be fixed. Due to various reasons, plans to increase the power generation capacity of the public sector plant to 4,000 MW were put on hold.
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