Coal-based thermal power plants (TPPs) consume vast quantities of accounting for close to 70 per cent of all water used for industrial purposes in India. Given this, thermal power plants can cause significant water stress in the local area, especially if they are present in clusters making WATER usage in power plants a critical issue. According to recent government data, over 8,000-10000 MW of thermal capacity was forced to shut down for acute water scarcity in the past couple of years. Moreover, developers are facing increasing difficulty in the selection of new sites for planned projects across the country. With water being a key input for several important plant processes such as cooling towers and ash handling systems, there is already a growing realisation amongst power plant operators about the need to reduce specific water consumption through best practices in water efficiency as well as technological efforts.

In December 2015, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) brought out a notification that set limits for the first time on how much water a thermal power plant can use per unit of electricity generated, called 'specific water consumption'. These regulations mandated that TPPs set up before January 1, 2017, should not use more than 3.5 Cubic Metres / MWh of water (equivalent to 3.5 litres of water per unit (KWh) of electricity generated) and those built after the date cannot exceed 3 Cubic metres/MWh. Power plants using sea water are exempted from this, and all plants had to meet the norms within two years of the notification, that is, by December 2017.

• Out of the total 156 plants/ units for which we could obtain the status, 66 claimed that they complied with the water consumption limits, while 30 admitted that they were non-compliant. For another 46 plants, either data was not available, or replies were ambiguous or the plants were closed. As other 14 plants were using sea water, they are exempted from the regulations.

• These 156 plants included a number of smaller, captive power plants. If we consider only the major power plants (those being monitored by the Central Electricity Authority in its Daily Generation Report or DGR list), then the number of plants for which we could get information was only 75, and in this 34 plants were compliant with the norms and 22 were not.

• Compliance with the regulations of water consumption is entirely self-reported by the respective power plants with no verification from any credible / independent agency. Most states did not give information about all the TPPs in the states, leading us to wonder whether the states are actually monitoring compliance by all the plants or just passively collecting information from whichever plant submits it, and ignoring others.

• There was no uniform format in which the information was provided to us in spite of the fact that there is a prescribed standard format for reporting compliance with the regulations. In many cases, the information provided to us was several months old, or even from earlier years, raising the question as to whether the collection of compliance information is being done on a regular basis.