KORBA (Chhattisgarh): Bharat Aluminium Company (BALCO), India’s iconic aluminium producer, has stepped up emergency planning and preparedness mechanism at its aluminium smelter and power plant, in light of the approaching monsoon. As Korba receives high rainfall during monsoons, a flood Control Room has been established for 24×7 surveillance through resources such as Bango dam water level analysis and Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) Data. BALCO has also digitalized control rooms with new age dashboards to ensure real-time monitoring of operations and decision making.
Abhijit Pati, CEO and Director, BALCO said, “BALCO has been continuously taking important and pro-active steps towards ensuring the safety of people and environment. We have deployed a smart combination of high-end technology and indigenous innovations to ensure health and safety of employees while maintaining continuity of business operations. Our commitment to safety is embedded in our vision, corporate objectives, production processes and the way we conduct our business.”
BALCO has been one of the early adopters in India to explore the field of smart technologies in its operational set-up. For integrating smart automation in its plant operations and to arrest any emergency without any manual intervention, BALCO has set up end to end Digital Dashboards for real-time data and trend monitoring of Power Plant operations, ensuring digitalization of the entire process. The digital dashboard is a key driver which gives access to historical data and digitized reports and reduces downtime time, enables quick decision making and analysis without manual intervention.
BALCO has also completed the integration of control rooms of Coal Handling Plant of 540 MW and 1200 MW power plants and has established a Centralized Control Room to avoid hampering of operations in case of any emergency. Also, at power plant an integrated coal truck management system has been implemented and commissioned for structured coal movement monitoring and control during the monsoon to avoid any congestion in the traffic during heavy rainfalls.
