Monday, March 11, 2013

How many energy units are produced by Power Plant in a single day

The electrical meter installed at our home measures energy units in KW-hr.
On the average, we consume about 300 units per month in non summer months (no AC), so really we are consuming about 300 KW-hr of electricity per month.

Say an average of 10 units per day.



So how many KW-hr does a power plant of of 300 MW size produce ?

Per day the power plant would produce = 1000 X 24 X 300 units =  72,00,000 units

However, the power plant would consume some of the power produced by it to run its own auxiliaries such as the coal handling plant, boiler feed pump, fans , pumps etc.

Hence on the average, auxiliary consumption is approximately 7% of the generated power for a unit of 300 MW sizing.

So the gross exportable power of the plant is 0.93 X 72,00,000 = 66,96,000 units

Further, we also need to consider the Plant Load Factor as the power plant would not be running contionously throughout the year.  It may have to take shutdowns for maintenance,  non-availability of coal, grid failures etc.

An average Plant Load Factor to consider for a new plant is 0.85 

So the net exportable power produced by a unit of 300 MW per day is 0.85 X 66,96,000 = 56, 91, 600 units per day.

If this plant was supplying power to only residential houses, then theoretically this power plant could power 5,69,160 houses considering an average of 10 units consumed by single house per day.

However in reality the Transmission, Distribution and Theft Losses in India are very high to the tune of 40 percent and this is where real change in policy is required.