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Coal to be primary fuel source for power in future: SCCL MD

Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) chairman and managing director Suthirtha Bhattacharya has said that to move India towards a cleaner and healthier energy future, we need to adopt clean energy technology.

Speaking at the national symposium on ‘Clean energy from the coal resource: Reliability linked to its relative abundance,’ organised as part of CSIR-IICT 70th year celebrations, under a new biennial symposium series called Coal Resurgence for Energy Secure Society (CRESS) here on Friday, Bhattacharya said that with coal continuing to play a key role in India’s energy mix, low emission coal technology may become an option in the long-term.

‘’Coal is the mainstay of India’s power generation in the past and continues to be the primary fuel source at present and as well as future. Coal is going to stay as primary fuel source for generation of power till 2035,” he remarked.

“Coal is the worst offender, a dirty energy source that creates a lot of environmental problems, but still we cannot give it up as it is the primary energy source for generating electricity in the country.

About 68 per cent of India’s current power generation is from coal and that share is expected to remain the same for many years to come,” he said.

He said as our power generation mainly depends on coal, we should look for clean coal technology as being done in many other countries. “Germany is setting up a clean coal power plant within two months and we are also expecting that technology to enter our country very soon,” he said.

He said Germany was also setting up 35,000 MW solar power plant and if it succeeds in doing so, that technology will also come to India and our power sector will be greatly benefited.

He said the policy makers should not encourage small capacity power plants as they create a lot of pollution. “The government should impose pollution cess on those companies which create pollution and use the fund for sponsoring researches on clean technology,” he remarked.

IICT director M Lakshmi Kantam stressed the need to use clean technology in the power sector. The use of inferior quality coal should be discouraged as it creates a lot of pollution, she said.

Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (R&D) executive director S Sekar, DK Gupta of Thermax India, Pune, Air Liquide India Global E&C Solutions technical adviser Amitava Banerjee, former IICT director KV Raghavan and others spoke.

A souvenir was also released on the occasion.

Source: The New Indian Express