PERFORM, ACHIEVE AND TRADE (PAT) SCHEME OF THERMAL POWER PLANTS A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

December 03, 2021

The Government of India in 2008, formed the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) under the National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency (NMEEE) for National Action Plan on Climate Change. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency launched Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) scheme to target country's energy-intensive industries to reduce its energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions.

CSE analysis on the effectiveness of the PAT scheme on Thermal Power Plants (TPPs) find that

• Energy reduction target given to thermal power plants is feeble which is only around 3 per cent compared to sector's overall energy consumption.
• Reduction of greenhouse gas emission is only around 2 per cent in one PAT cycle against the annual CO2 emission of 825.6 million tons from the electricity generation. This 2 per cent reduction rolls out from one PAT cycle of three years duration.
• Data transparency is poor and any data like capacity of the thermal power stations, percentage of energy reduction target assigned to each TPPs, energy reduction achieved by TPPs, plant-wise purchase of ESCerts are not available for the public view and are kept confidential.
• Thermal power plants show compliance by energy reduction or purchasing Energy Savings Certificates (ESCerts). Having the option of acquiring ESCerts for compliance makes it far less expensive for thermal power plants to demonstrate compliance by installing energy saving measures.
• BEE framed the penalty for the non-achievers of the PAT scheme. However, the plants which had not achieved the assigned energy reduction in the first PAT cycle are not penalized yet even though PAT cycle -6 is in progress.

CSE analysis shows that the total emission reduction at the end of completed first two PAT cycles from thermal power plant sector is 24.85 million tonnes of CO2, which is only 3 per cent of the total annual emission from the sector. This 24.85 million tonnes of CO2 rolls out from two PAT cycles of three years duration each. So, the achieved annual emission reduction is very feeble. This highlights the fact that the target given to TPPs is very less compared to the overall emission reduction from the sector. The energy reduction target should be made stringent in order to meet up with the global climate commitments with respect to greenhouse gas emission mitigation. Targets must be interlinked to material CO2 reduction.

For any queries, contact

Sowmiya Kannappan
Programme Officer – Industrial Pollution Team
+91 95855 24026
sowmiya.k@cseindia.org