Power and Energy Engineering

Biography

Biography: Avijit Mallick

Abstract

Developing countries like India require abundant reliable and continuous supply of energy to boost up its economic development. In the recent years, there is a huge rise in demand of electricity due to rapid growth in population and economy. Presently these demands in electricity are nearly 60% matched by coal based thermal power plant. India has the fifth largest power generation portfolio in the world and its current renewable energy contribution stands at 44.812 GW. Whereas total thermal power plant installed capacity is 212467 MW. Due to abundance of national coal reserve and political promises for free electricity to farmers and others backward section, the progress on renewable source of electricity has been reviewed and highlighted in this paper in details. On the other hand coal power generation is characterized by local and regional environmental degradation as well as green house gas emission leading to climate change. Recently India has an ambitious target of 175 GW of renewable power by 2022. So with this target a comparison study has been done between the growth in renewable energy and the coal based thermal power generation as well as the green house gas emission. India is also equally stand by the target to restrict the global temperature increases to 2⁰C by the year 2020 as discussed by COP21. Thus the Indian government has taken several positive steps to tackle climate change. In this paper, progress in renewable energy growth and how it is influencing the market share of coal based thermal power plant electricity generation has been discussed in detail. The challenges and mitigations for enforcing the renewable source of electricity suppressing the coal based thermal power plant generation that has environmental impact are also highlighted.