The recent claim made by state-owned National Thermal Power Corporation that it was the world's second most efficient thermal power producer has kicked off a controversy.
Company officials admitted that they had juxtaposed the emission data for 2005-06 with the generation data of 2007-08 to arrive at such a conclusion.
During those two financial years, the country's largest thermal power producer increased its generation capacity by nearly 6 per cent to around 200 billion units per annum, almost all from fossil fuels (gas and coal). "When we use generation and emission figures of the same year, we no more remain at the second position," said a senior official of the company.
This was in response to a report by Washington-based Centre for Global Development, which said NTPC was the world's third-largest polluting power producer.
The report drew instant criticism from the NTPC management, which accused CGD of using wrong data and also questioned its methodology.
In response to a questionnaire sent by Business Standard, CGD, a non-profit organisation, said its own calculation for energy intensity revealed that the Indian power company could not claim to be the second most efficient power producer in the world.
"NTPC's pairing of power production (figures) from 2007-08 with emissions data from 2005-06 resulted in an artificially low carbon intensity,"