A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Environment, Resources and Development

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1991

In this study, performance of coal-fired thermal power generation in India is analyzed at unit, plant and utility levels. At plant and utility levels, best practice frontier analysis, a method to find relative efficiencies of units, is used. At unit level and fo1· financial performance of unities, radio analysis is used where certain ratios are considered at different levels. Ratio analysis is simple and yields understandable results. Here it is used as relevant data required for other types of analyses were not available. Utilities are compared with selected Asian utilities also. Policy aspects of performance studies are also included. Utilities are compared from emission point of view. Overall emission from thermal power generation in the past and its projection for the future are also presented. It is found that a few plants are performing efficiently and majority of the inefficient. plants employ more of labour, auxiliary power and capacity per output. Plants of sizes up to 550 MW are found to perform better compared to bigger size plants. Majority of the plants had fluctuating performance over time . Performance of plants in Southern region was the best in the country and that of Eastern region was the poorest. Plants owned and operated by private companies are performing better than publicly owned ones. Poor national averages of PLF and availability were due to: i) poor performance of 110-120 MW units, ii) indigenous supply of equipment. which had high forced outage rates that had arisen out of poor quality of coal and failure of turbine generators, main transformers etc. Regional variation in capacity utilization was prominent - south being the best performer and eastern and north- eastern regions being the poor performers. Availability of older units (above fifteen years of age) were bette1· than the newer units. Performance of bigger size utilities (6 GWH or more) are poorer than the smaller size utilities and utilities with more hydro share are performing better. Best practice Indian utilities are performing as good as some other Asian utilities in terms of technical efficiency. Private utilities are performing better as compared to public ones.