WORK OVERVIEW

India faces a huge energy deficit, with millions of households without power for basic lighting or cooking, and coal power is essential for the next few decades to resolve this energy crisis, to address the issue of energy access, which is just as important as the environmental problems of unclean power. 

Centre for Science and Environment believes that we need to push for renewables – not because we can afford to do without coal, but because it is the urgent requirement to address the looming climate change concerns. At the same time, it is equally important is to clean up our coal power sector so that it does not destroy the environment and take human lives. This entails shutting down old and inefficient power plants, and reducing emissions from the remaining ones. 

In this background, CSE has two programmes in its ‘Clean Coal-Power plants’ initiative – national and international – which aim to improve environmental performance of coal-based thermal power stations, focusing especially on reducing emissions of pollutants like particulate matter (PM), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx).

 

National Programme CSE has been studying the coal-based thermal power sector in India since 2011. The work started as an off shoot of the UNDP’s The Green Ratings Project (GRP), one of the millennium development goal projects. Read more

International Programme For the past few years, CSE has been working in Indonesia to support implementation of new emission norms for thermal power sector. The country is aggressively adding coal-based capacit Read more