Thermal Power Plants in India are unhealthiest worldwide: Study

GENEVA: A global study claims that power plants in India are the unhealthiest in the world. The researchers from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland said that the Coal-fired power plants produce more than just carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Burning of coal also releases particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury which in turn damages the health of many people around the world.

The researchers modelled and calculated the undesired side effects of coal power for each of the 7,861 power plant units in the world to estimate the urgent need for actions.

The results of the study were published in the journal ‘Nature Sustainability’, showed that China and the United States are the two largest producers of thermal power using coal, but power plants in India take the highest toll in the world when it comes to health.

Stefanie Hellweg from ETH Zurich’s Institute of Environmental Engineering, who led the study, said that the Countries in Central Europe, North America, and China all have modern power plants equipped with better technology that pollutes less, but Eastern Europe, Russia and India still have older power plants equipped with insufficient flue gas treatment. These power plants only remove a fraction of the pollutants due to old school technology and often burning coal of inferior quality.

Christopher Oberschelp, the lead author of the study, said, “More than half of the health effects can be traced back to just one-tenth of the power plants. These power plants should be upgraded or shut down as quickly as possible.”

The coal power production globally shows that the gap between privileged and disadvantaged regions is widening. There can possibly be two reasons. Firstly, wealthy countries like in Europe import high-quality coal with a high calorific value and low emissions of harmful sulphur dioxide.

The poorer coal-exporting countries such as Indonesia, Colombia and South Africa are left with low-quality coal, which they use for their outdated power plants without modern flue gas treatment to remove sulphur dioxide.

The researchers said that reducing the negative health effects of coal power generation should be a global priority. “But further industrialisation, especially in China and India, poses the risk of aggravating the situation instead,” they added.

As per the researchers, power plant operators have an economic interest in keeping their plants running for a long time because the initial investment costs for the construction of a coal power plant are high, but the subsequent operating costs are low.

Obersche said, “The best option is therefore to not build any new coal power plants. From a health and environment perspective, we should move away from coal and towards natural gas- and in the long term, towards renewable energy sources.”