The Hindu : A hydel power project with a difference

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 24, 2003

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A hydel power project with a difference

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

SHAPUR (MAHARASHTRA) AUG. 23. In the bowels of the Chonde hills in Thane district, 40 km from here, connected to the outside world by a warren of enormous tunnels, a hydel power project will go on stream in February 2005, producing by May that year, 250 mw of electricity.

But to produce 450 million units annually, the project will consume 600 million units.

Makes commercial sense?

"It does," say those connected with the project, including the builders, the Irrigation Department of the Maharashtra Government and its power utility, the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB), for, the power used will be cheaper — drawn from the grid at off-peak time — than the power generated and sold to consumers.

The project, conceived in the late '80s, was to cost Rs. 179 crores. Poor funding, delays and cost overruns have pushed up the cost to Rs. 1,146 crores, 70 per cent of it going towards generation equipment.

Civil works, awesome as they are, cost less, for, instead of building chutes to draw water and a masonry structure to house the power sets, everything has been carved out of the hills. Some 75 tonnes of explosives have been used to blast them into tunnels and caverns.

There can be occasions, officials concede, when the off-peak surplus may be unavailable.

As MSEB has tremendous shortfalls, sometimes of the order of 1,200 mw at peak time, sources say "we will have to fit it into our schedule because 250 mw is critical to our generation needs."

If that happens, Ghatghar may well be the only pumped storage scheme of that size in the country to work in dual mode, a fact engineers at the site take pride in.

A pumped storage hydroelectric power plant with access to 5.87 million cubic metres of water will be used to drive the turbines. Thereafter, the used water is stored in a lower dam and pumped back to the reservoir overhead, a process repeated daily.

At Ghatghar, it will generate power for seven hours at peak demand time and switch, reversing the turbines to work as a pump, at nights to refill the reservoir half-a-kilometre overhead.

There are pumped storage power houses elsewhere in the country — Srisailam, Andhra Pradesh (700 mw), Kadampari, Tamil Nadu (400 mw), Kada, Gujarat (180mw), Tata's Bhira (150 mw) and smaller 12 mw units at Paithan and Ujni in Maharashtra. The difference is, these projects have not found the off-peak surplus to pump the water back.

Named after the hilltop tribal village Ghatghar — the cavern sits half-a-km beneath it — this enterprise will impound water from the Pravara river, the dam itself distinctive in Asia since for every 85 kg of cement, 210 kg of fly ash has been used in the mix.

All the equipment has arrived, the first 125-mw unit from Fuji Electrical in Japan, the second made by the BHEL under Fuji's specifications and supervision.

They are being put together in the cavern and the project is racing towards completion.

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