The Machines That 'Make Money'

This is not a currency printing tool, of course, but coal samplers and analysers from the stable of Enelex, a special electronics company from the Czech Republic that helped South African miners make huge savings by cutting down the penalty paid to their customers for coal quality mismatch. Vladimir Jenista, Commercial Director, Enelex, tells Arindam Bandyopadhyay about the company’s unique offerings and how the Indian coal miners (and power generating companies) can replicate the example of their South African counterparts by using these products.

Please tell us about Enelex and its unique product offerings for the mining sector.

Enelex is a company with around 25 years of experience in the field of coal quality management. Our core activities comprise designing, manufacturing, installation and maintenance of our coal quality management systems all over the world. The major customers are coal miners and power plants, which deal in coal either as a product or as a raw material.

As you are well aware, coal-fired power plants sign agreements with coal miners on the quality of coal to be supplied by the latter. This is important because every boiler is designed for a definite range of coal grades. If the quality of coal supplied is lower or higher than the specified range, it affects the functioning of the boiler and also the turbine plant and compromises the plant’s efficiency, leading to losses in generation and delivery of electricity into the national grid.

To avoid such operational and financial losses, it is important that the power plant inspects and maintains the quality of coal coming into bunkers before the material is put into boilers. With the installation of our automatic sampler and other products, it is possible to continuously monitor and thus maintain the coal quality within the required range.

I will give you an example here. Some time back, we installed our coal analysers in South Africa for a global mining company. Now, this company was supplying coal to Eskom, the South African electricity public utility, and was paying huge penalties for frequent mismatch of quality. But, ever since they installed our machines, they didn’t have to pay any penalty at all. So great were the savings that they coined the term ‘money making machine’ to describe our coal analysers!