Singareni Collieries Company Ltd has plans to expand its power generation capacity from the present 1,500 megawatt to 4,050 MW in the years to come.
IT has plans to establish 250 MW floating solar power plant on Lower Manair Dam (LMD) waters, add another 800 MW unit at its existing 2×600 MW thermal power plant and also another 1,500 MW solar plants in the mining areas. The company has 219 MW capacity of solar plants at eight locations out of 300 MW plants planned in the first phase. Work on the remaining 81 MW solar power plants is nearing completion.
Plans of the coal company were explained by Director (Operations) of SCCL S. Chandrasekhar while speaking at the 9th Asian Mining Congress organised by the Mining, Geological & Metallurgical Institute of India (MGMI) at Kolkata on Tuesday. Speaking on “Technological Progress in the Mining Sector: Present Scenario and Challenges”, he said SCCL was ahead of several other public sector coal companies in the country in adopting new technologies.
He stated that apart from meeting the energy needs, supply of coal for power generation, of the Southern States the company had also diversified into thermal and solar power generation. Mr. Chandrasekhar said SCCL was the first public sector coal company in the country to implement ERP and SAP system successfully.
Sand making
Singareni was also first to introduce heavy machinery such as dragline excavator, load haul dumper (LHD) and side discharge loader (SDL) in coal mining. The company was also getting ready for sand making or extraction of sand from the overburden. To meet the demand of explosives used for mining, the company had established 50,000 tonnes per annum capacity site mixed slurry explosives plant.
The company has also completed 21.6 km railway line to transport coal from Srirampur area mines to Singareni thermal power plant at Pegadapalli in Mancherial district. Stating that the company had set a target to mine 70 million tonnes of coal during 2022-23, Mr. Chandrasekhar said coal production would be commenced in the Naini coal block allotted to the company in Odisha soon.
Coal Secretary Anil Kumar Jain, Chairman of Coal India Ltd Parmod Agarwal, CIL Director (Technical) Veera Reddy, several senior officials of SCCL including its Director (E&M) D. Satyanarayana Rao participated in the two-day meet attended by representatives from 20 countries.
