Planned thermal plants could kill 8.4 lakh people: Study

NEW DELHI: If India were to establish every coal-powered plant it has planned, its power generation capacity would go from 200 Giga Watt (GW) in 2018 to 300 GW by 2030. The study by researchers from the University of Maryland, Urban Emissions Info, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Texas Tech University, published by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, has found that 78,000 deaths in India were caused due to coal plants in 2018, the base year for the study. Assuming that all coal plants that were in the pipeline were set up, deaths linked to them would go up to 1,12,000 per year, and the lifetime impact of these new plants is approximated to be 8,44,000 premature deaths.

Dr Maureen Cropper, lead author of the study, said that they first run the model using estimated of emissions of PM2.5, Nitric Oxide and Sulfur Dioxide from all sources except power plants in 2018. In the third run, they added emissions from the planned plants, and then mortality was calculated for stroke, ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections, diabetes mellitus and lung cancer.