OREANDA-NEWS. India's Power Generation is mainly Coal based and the Power Sector is currently plagued by Coal shortages where Power Plants are stranded due to non-availability of Indigenous Coal supplies. This has triggered a series of Companies to either resort to operating the plant on part load due to non-availability of domestic coal or make up for the shortfall by blending indigenous coal with imported coal. Being heterogeneous in nature, the properties of Coal vary from source to source. The performance of Power equipment is dependent on the coal being fed to the power plant.

Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), a Maharatna PSU, has been designing boilers for the past 30 years and has extensive experience of designing boilers fired with indigenous as well as imported coals exhibiting wide variations in properties. Based on BHEL's extensive in-house experience of working with a great variety of indigenous as well as imported coals over the years, BHEL has developed a new Boiler with Fuel flexibility of Indigenous & Imported Coals. BHEL is now ready to offer the new boiler design to overcome these issues.

This new boiler design is based on a unique combination of indigenous and imported coals but is capable of firing both extremes of 100% domestic coal as well as 100% imported coal. It will provide developers with much needed freedom regarding the ratio of blending as well as the characteristics of the domestic and imported coal to be blended. This enables the boiler to work over the entire range of blending ratios and would protect the project developer against the vagaries in coal availability, thereby providing him with an opportunity to operate the plant throughout the year.

BHEL has an advanced state of the art Coal Research Centre at its Tiruchirapally plant which will be used to identify the unique combination of blended coal after carrying out the analysis of imported and domestic coal samples supplied by the customers. The associated boiler auxiliaries, also manufactured by BHEL, will be designed to accommodate the variation during firing of different type of fuels.

With this development, BHEL is being true to their vision statement as a solution provider for better tomorrow in the energy sector by addressing the major concern among Owners/ Developers about the growing uncertainty of coal availability in the country.

Addressing today's environment where thermal power plants are starved for fuel and developers face severe uncertainties regarding the availability of domestic and imported coals, BHEL's new design with fuel flexibility will be a major step forward in this direction.