How much electricity India’s power stations actually generate each month — and the fuel mix behind it. This tracks conventional generation: the coal and gas plants, big hydro dams, nuclear reactors and imports that the grid dispatches on demand. Watch coal do the heavy lifting, hydro swell every monsoon, and total output climb with the economy. CEA / National Power Portal data. Excludes solar and wind, which are metered separately.
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Range
Monthly electricity generation
What you’re looking at. Each bar of the stack is a fuel source’s output for the month, in billion units (BU — one unit is a kilowatt-hour); the top of the stack is total conventional generation. Coal and gas (“thermal”) supply roughly four-fifths of it and set the baseline; hydro is the seasonal wave that fills every monsoon and thins out by winter; nuclear is the steady sliver; imports are mostly hydropower from Bhutan. The coal-utilisation view shows thermal plant load factor — the share of their rated capacity that coal and lignite stations actually run at (CEA computes it for coal/lignite plants only, not gas) — which has risen from barely half in 2019–20 (a low of 42% in the April 2020 lockdown) to roughly 65–75% in recent years, peaking at about 76% in April 2024. Figures are CEA’s monthly generation report, using CEA’s actual load factor (not its programme target); the most recent month is provisional (CEA’s tentative report) until CEA publishes the actual. This series does not include solar, wind or small-hydro (renewable) generation, which CEA reports under a separate account.
Source: Central Electricity Authority — Monthly Generation Report, via the National Power Portal · conventional generation (thermal, nuclear, hydro & imports), excludes renewables · PolityPolicy · India, in Numbers · by Tushar Gupta
High Frequency Indicators · India, in Numbers
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