Energy situation in Tamil Nadu to look up

Energy situation in Tamil Nadu will look up with the commissioning of 1320 Mega Power plant  by the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (TANGEDCO) in the next nine months while work on the much delayed Second Oil refinery project at Nagapatinam is all set to commence in July this year according to official sources.

The long pending second refinery project of Nine million ton capacity of the Chennai Petroleum Corporation has been at the proposal stage for the past ten years. A vast state like Tamil Nadu manages its petroleum product requirement through a refinery at Manali in North Chennai set up way back in 1965.

Seven hundred acres of land required for the refinery project has been acquired by the Tamil Nadu government and work on construction of the refinery is expected to start in July this year. The project is likely to be commissioned in three years.  Work on setting up the Mooring berth near the refinery site has commenced. The berth will have a deep draft of 28 meters where Very Large Crude Carriers VLCCs can berth and unload the required crude for the refinery.

Meanwhile nearly Seventy per cent of the work on the TANGEDCO’s Mega thermal plant at Udangudi in Southern Tamil Nadu has been completed. The 1320 MW plant conceived way back in 2008 is expected to be commissioned by December this year. Coal requirement for the plant is five million tons per annum. Since it is a state project the entire generation will go to the Tamil Nadu grid.

An all weather port is getting commissioned near the thermal plant where the coal handling equipment will be set up. The port will have a draft of 16 meters where ships from Paradip carrying domestic coal or the imported ones from Indonesia to Australia can berth.

Coal unloaded at the port will move to thermal plant through conveyor belts.