The power-starved Karnataka is set to get a share of 400 MW from September when the first generation unit — with a capacity of 800 MW — at the National Thermal Power Corporation’s (NTPC) green field power project in Kudgi of Vijayapura will begin commercial operations.
In terms of energy, the State will get 9.6 million units a day, which is over five per cent of its daily power consumption.
The 4,000 MW supercritical thermal power plant, which is the first ever plant by the NTPC to be set up in Karnataka, will have three generating units with a capacity of 800 MW each in the first phase and another two units with a capacity of 800 MW in the second phase.
While the first unit will begin commercial generation in September, the second and third unit too would begin generation in February-March 2017 and August-September 2017 respectively, according to NTPC’s top officials.
Being the host State, Karnataka will get 50 per cent of the power generated in the plant while the remaining power would be distributed among other southern States. This would mean that Karnataka would get 1,200 MW of power when all the three generating units begin commercial operation under the first phase of the project.
According to Subhasis Ghosh, NTPC’s Regional Executive Director (West-1), the first generating unit would be synchronised with the State power grid some time in the third or fourth week of this month to facilitate trial generation. The project, whose first phase is being taken up at a cost of Rs. 15,166 crore, has adopted the innovative supercritical technology that not only increases the efficiency of operation by about 5 per cent, but also reduces the coal consumption by 8 per cent to 10 per cent when compared to the conventional thermal power stations, he said.
The water saving technology, including recycling used water and pumping out fly-ash in the form of a paste instead of slurry, will result in saving water to the tune of six lakh cubic metres a year, according to Balaji Iyengar, group general manager at Kudgi Plant.
The work on the plant, which is coming up on about 3,000 acres of land, began in March 2012. The protests by farmers against land acquisition had initially delayed the work.
