India to cut down coal imports by 15 MT in next six months.

New Delhi: Piyush Goyal, Minister of state for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy and Mines, today announced that Coal India has set a target to replace around 15 million tone of imported coal with domestic coal in the next six months.

“Power plants in India have been designed not to function on indigenous coal due to which it is very unfortunate that India continue to import coal from other countries inspite of the fact that we are a coal surplus nation today,” said Goyal while addressing a media event here.

The Minister urged everyone to come up with new ideas for finding a sustainable solution for this challenge, according to a statement released by the Power Ministry.

The Minister also talked about power decentralization initiatives saying that, apart from shifting to renewable energy, The government is focusing upon distributed energy production, where consumers themselves can start generating power.

"The rooftop solar power programme will be expanded from 300 MW today to 40000 MW in the next six years", he added.

Rooftop solar will not only provide energy security but will also give support to thousands of people living in areas inaccessible to grid-based power supply, he added.

Goyal also said that wasteful usage of energy is a big concern today.

Source : energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com​