Adani Power said it will set up a new 1,600 MW coal power plant at Godda Jharkhand to supply power to Bangladesh for a period of 25 years.
It said the company has signed a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the Bangladesh Power Development Board for the same. The plant will be of the ‘ultra-supercritical’ class.
This is one of the few and rare cases of new coal-based power plants being flagged off in India in recent years.
The country already has a large number of coal-based power plants, some of whose viability has come under question due to both commercial as well as environmental concerns.
Coal-based plants cost around Rs 2 per kWh to generate electricity, besides the cost of polluting the environment.
In contrast, solar power plants cost around Rs 2.4 per unit and have close to zero pollution footprint from their operations.
It is expected that the cost of solar power will fall below the Rs 2 mark in the next 2-3 years, after which coal will increasingly be used to generate power primarily in the night, when solar doesn’t work.
Besides, wind power tariffs have also come down to Rs 2.65 and could come down to about Rs 2.50 in the next two years, going by current trends.
Unlike solar, wind power can be produced at night too, but the variability is slightly higher.