Power plant[edit]

The Badarpur Thermal Power Station has an installed capacity of 705 MW. It is
situated in south east corner of Delhi on Mathura Road near Faridabad. It was the first
central sector power plant conceived in India, in 1965. It was originally conceived to
provide power to neighbouring states of Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, U.P.,
Rajasthan, and Delhi. But since year 1987 Delhi has become its sole beneficiary. It
was owned and conceived by Central Electric Authority. Its construction was started
in year 1968, and the First unit was commissioned on 26 July 1973. The coal for the
plant is derived from the Jharia Coal Fields. This was constructed under ownership of
Central Electric Authority, later it was transferred to NTPC.
It supplies power to Delhi city. It is one of the oldest plant in operation. Its 100 MW
units capacity have been reduced to 95 MW. These units have indirectly fired boiler,
while 210 MW units have directly fired boiler. All the turbines are of Russian Design.
Both turbine and boilers have been supplied by BHEL. The boiler of Stage-I units are
of Czech. design. The boilers of Unit 4 and 5 are designed by combustion engineering
(USA). The instrumentation of the stage I units and unit 4 are of The Russian design.
Instrumentation of unit5 is provided by M/S Instrumentation Ltd. Kota, is of Kent
design.
In 1978 the management of the plant was transferred to NTPC, from CEA. The
performance of the plant increased significantly, and steadily after take over by NTPC
till 2006, but now the plant is facing various issues.
Being an old plant, Badarpur Thermal Power Station (BTPS) has little automation. Its
performance is deteriorating due to various reasons, like aging, poor quantity and
quality of cooling water etc. It receive cooling water from Agra Canal, which is an
irrigation canal from Yamuna river. Due to rising water pollution, the water of
Yamuna is highly polluted. This polluted water when goes into condenser, adversely
affect life of condenser tubes, resulting in frequent tube leakages. This dirty water
from tube leakages, gets mixed into feed water cycle causes numerous problems, like
frequent boiler tube leakages, and silica deposition on turbine blades.
Apart from poor quality, the quantity of water supply is also erratic due to lack of coordination between NTPC and UP irrigation which manages Agra Canal.
The quality of the coal supplied has degraded considerably. At worst times, there were
many unit tripping owing to poor quality. The poor coal quality also put burdens on
equipment, like mills and their performance also goes down.The coal for the plant is

fetched from far away, that makes the total fuel cost double of coal cost at coalmine.
This