NEW DELHI: Pus hing to curb gas prices and exploit the country’s resources fully, Power Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday said that the government is looking to sign long-term gas contracts with other countries to run its under-utilised power plants.
“We are hoping to tie up longterm gas contracts... so that we can start powering our gas-based power plants once again many of which are running at a very low level of capacity utilisation,” Goyal said addressing a ministerial session at Petrotech conference.
Elaborating further, he said, “This will not only provide us clean fuel but also lead to spinning reserve so that our electricity grid remains stable. This will help us providing 24X7 affordable power to all by 2022.” Earlier in 2015, the government had launched gas subsidy scheme under the Power System Development Fund (PSDF) to run stranded gas-based power plants is the country. So far three phases of auction of e-bid Re-gasified Liquefied Natural Gas have been completed and the fourth Phase is presently under operation from October 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017.
Under the fourth phase, PSDF support ranges from Rs 0.21 per unit to Rs 0.22 per unit, which was secured by the successful bidders in the reverse auction. The grid-connected gas based power generation capacity in the country is 24,150 MW. Of this, a capacity of 14,305 MW had no supply of domestic gas. These comprise 29 plants, which were eligible to participate in the auction under PSDF. In another session, NI TI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, that the Petroleum Ministry and Petrochemical Ministry should be linked together. Talking about Make in India, he said there is specific plan across 25 sectors for make in India and there has been continuous monitoring of these sectors by the centre.