A coal rake on its way to the NTPC power plant at Kahalgaon. Picture by Amit Kumar

Kahalgaon (Bhagalpur), June 21: The five-day incessant rainfall in and around Bihar has dealt a powerful blow to the state’s electricity generation, disrupting coal supply to National Thermal Power Corporation’s (NTPC’s) Kahalgaon plant from Rajmahal fields, an undertaking of Eastern Coalfields Limited in Godda district of Jharkhand.

The adverse weather condition for the past five days has hindered power production at the NTPC’s Kahalgaon plant big time. Owing to the supply crunch, its three units were shut down.

T. Gopal Krishnan, additional manager, fuel, NTPC, Kahalgaon, said the coal transportation from Rajmahal coalfield, popularly known as Lalmatiya coal project, has been badly hit because of continuous rain. According to him, the movement of goods trains carting coal through the merry-go-round track has been disrupted too because of the rainfall.

The merry-go-round rail route is used exclusively for supplying coal to the NTPC’s units at Kahalgaon and Farakka from Lalmatiya.

Krishnan said on June 20, the Kahalgaon unit received four rakes of coal through the merry-go-round rail route and a rake through the Indian Railways tracks.

He added: “Today, a rake of coal through the merry-go-round rail route and another through the Indian Railways arrived at the Kahalgaon unit. The coal the unit gets through Indian Railways’ tracks is imported.”

Krishnan told reporters here that the coal shortage had been a major problem in the power plant for a long time. He said the crisis this time had been severe.

Sources in Rajmahal coalfield said the difficult weather condition had disrupted operations inside the coalpits, triggering the crisis. The situation would be back to normal within a few days, they added.

Sources in the Kahalgaon unit said the Kahalgaon power plant’s unit number 1 was shut down last night because of the coal crisis. On June 13 and 14, unit 6 and 7 were shut down because of the coal crisis.

Unit number 1, having capacity of 210MW, supplies 40 per cent of power to Bihar while units 6 and 7, having capacity of 500MW, supplies 6.6 per cent of its production to Bihar.

The NTPC’s Kahalgaon unit is a super thermal power project. Besides Bihar, several other states bank on it for electricity.