Water management initiatives

Although our power stations do not consume water intensively, some of them depend on water for cooling as in the case of our fossil fuel fleet, or for cleaning in the case or our solar farms.

Water scarcity is one of the key business continuity risks for our Jhajjar power plant. The plant draws water from the Jawahar Lal Nehru (JLN) canal, which is fed by rivers from the snowy Himalayan region. During winter, water availability in the canal goes down as most catchment areas remain frozen. Recently, we also experienced a shortage of water during the summer as demand for potable water and agriculture use was high due to lower rainfall.

We have a water supply agreement with the Haryana Irrigation Department (HID). Whilst we did not face any serious water shortage so far, due to high water demand or during maintenance undertaken by HID, HID deviated twice from 16 non-supply days to 24 days during the summer, and resulted in water stocks at power station reaching its lowest levels, and posed a risk of plant availability loss. In view of this, we have planned to construct an additional reservoir in 2020.

Water efficiency has always been a focus area for us and we have taken the following measures to improve our performance:

• Installation of drift eliminators in cooling tower to reduce water loss by capturing water droplets from air drifts which resulted in water savings of about 2 percent;

• Installation of water meters at various points to enhance monitoring of water usage and implementation of conservation measures; and

• Improving cycles of concentration in our cooling tower which resulted in signification reduction of water consumption.