Coal Joint Venture Operating Mechanism

As a form of Independent Power Plant (IPP), the company of coal and electricity consortium excavates inferior coal (lignite) which is easy for open-cut mining but of low heat productivity and transforms it into electricity power on spot, thus brings the excavation process of coal mine and the process flow of power plant together into an integrated production, forming an energy base with electric power as the end product. This is also a very economical form in terms of saving energy.Internationally, the energy development model of coal and electricity consortium has been broadly used. As early as in the 70's, many countries, such as the United States and Australia, built a number of thermal power plants in the form of coal and electricity consortium, playing a very important role in supplying a great deal of clean energy for their own economic development. Comparatively speaking, the energy development model of the coal and electricity consortium in China began to take off at later time. The main reason is the technology restraints of the power generation and transportation. Because the coal base is far away from the load center, advanced technology for long-distance electricity transportation with super high voltage and steam turbo-generators are required to establish electricity power stations near the coal mines. At that time, China did not have the production technology and operation management expertise for machines of power generation and transportation, so the main equipments needed had to be imported as complete sets. Therefore, according to the technical and economic evaluation report, the investment proposal is not reasonable. In a word, restraints of the objective and historical conditions affected the development of the coal and electricity consortium in China. In the mid 80's, China set forth, in its national strategic outline of energy development, China's energy development policy of "exploiting the coal mines, building electricity power stations near the coal mines and shifting the transportation of coal to electricity". As China's first pilot project of the coal and electricity consortium, the project of Yiming Coal and Electricity Consortium was formally approved by the Chinese government in 1990. This project, with a total investment of about 12.6 billion RMB when the coal mines, power stations and transportation lines were all included, was finally accomplished and went into operation in 1999. Its unit cost is 12600 Yuan RMB per kilowatt, which is as more than two times as the unit cost(about 4000-5000 Yuan RMB per kilowatt) of other contemporary thermal electricity power stations.Compared with foreign projects of coal and electricity consortium, such projects in China did not have obvious disadvantages in terms of hardware such as technologies for coal-mine excavation and electricity generation. Nevertheless, there do exist big gaps in the aspect of software such as the company's operation mechanism and external operation environment, as well as production management and production efficiency. For example, the installed capacity and employees of Yalong Power Plant in Australia are 1450MW and 600 respectively, with an average installed capacity of 2.43MW per person. On the contrary, the installed capacity, total employees and average installed capacity of Yiming Power Plant are 1000MW, 7630 and 0.13MW per person respectively. The former is as 18.6 times as the latter. In 1998, the electric power production of Yalong Power Plant is 10.3 billion KWH, with an average of 1.716 GWH per person, while the planned electric power production of Yiming company for the year of 2000 is 4 billion KWH, with an average of 0.052 GWH per person. The production efficiency of the Australian company is as 33 times as that of the Chinese counterpart. Judging from the above-mentioned comparative analysis of the electric power production, the yearly capacity rate of Yalong Power Plant is as high as 81%(7100/8760), while the yearly capacity rate of Yiming Coal and Electricity Consortium is only 45.6%(40...