Impressive record

Published : Jul 18, 2008 00:00 IST

Chandan Roy, Director (Operations). -

Chandan Roy, Director (Operations). -

NTPC plants have witnessed high operational performance over the years. Will it be able to maintain the impressive record? Thanks to a number of smart operation strategies, says Chandan Roy, Director (Operations), we will be able not only to keep it up but to improve it further.

Capacity utilisation percentage utilisation of available generating capacity of NTPC power plants reached 92.24 per cent in the financial year 2007-08, which is a world benchmark for a utility as large as NTPC, which has more than 29,000 MW installed capacity with 110 units. To put things in perspective, the average national capacity utilisation in the year has been 78.61 per cent only, he says.

There have been similar dramatic enhancements in other operational areas such as safety performance, thermal efficiency, equipment availability, equipment outage rate and generating costs, says Roy. He adds that this has been possible with forward planning and monitoring tools; active institution building; use of advanced IT-enabled tools; new technology initiatives; stress on quality of repair and maintenance; and other initiatives including the development of non-OEM vendors for spares procurement, enabling faster delivery schedules and lower costs.

NTPC had taken over four plants from various State electricity boards and agencies. These are the Firoze Gandhi Unchahar Thermal Power Station (FgUTPS), the Talcher Thermal Power Station (TTPS), the Tanda Thermal Power Station (TaTPS) and the Badarpur Thermal Power Station (BTPS). These plants are now fully owned and operated by NTPC like our other plants. Naturally their performance levels have also been brought to the same level as of other NTPC plants, says Roy.

For instance, he says, when NTPC took over Unchahar in1992, the plant was not under regular operation. However, after taking it over, NTPC implemented its regular systems and placed some of its human resource. With our good efforts we realised a PLF [plant load factor] of about 73 per cent. Now, the Unchahar plant is one of the best performing power stations, even in NTPC. In 2007-08, the plant clocked a PLF of 97.69 per cent and was ranked No. 2 among all NTPC stations.

Dinesh Chandra
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