How much electricity and wood does a micro, small or medium dal mill use a year?
TERI's Indore profile: a micro mill making 5,000 t a year uses 128,000 kWh and no wood; a small mill at 10,000 t uses 240,000 kWh and about 71 t of wood; a medium mill at 20,000 t uses 320,000 kWh and 100 t. Per tonne, the medium mill uses 16 kWh against the micro mill's 25.6.
The three mills compared
- Micro, 5,000 t a year: 128,000 kWh, no wood, 11.0 toe. 25.6 kWh per tonne.
- Small, 10,000 t a year: 240,000 kWh, 71,429 kg of wood, 49.2 toe. 24 kWh and about 7 kg of wood per tonne.
- Medium, 20,000 t a year: 320,000 kWh, 100,000 kg of wood, 67.5 toe. 16 kWh and 5 kg of wood per tonne.
- Small mills are 60% of Indore's mills and use about 70% of the cluster's energy.
What the kWh run
Gravity separators with motors up to 10 hp, three dehusking stages on 15 to 30 hp motors, splitters, graders and sorters on belts and pulleys, cup conveyors between floors, dust blowers that run all day at constant load, and compressors of 10 to 25 hp. A medium mill spreads that fixed load over twice the tonnes of a small one, which likely explains much of the 8 kWh per tonne gap.
The wood question
TERI's text says micro and small mills sun dry on roofs and terraces and only medium mills fire wood ovens, mostly in the monsoon. Its table still gives small mills 71 t of wood a year. If you burn any, weigh it: in a small or medium mill it is the biggest energy input by heat, it does not count in your fossil total, and a buyer or lender will still ask how much you burn and where it came from.
Quick ways to get below your size's figure
- Replace rewound and standard motors with IE3 as they fail: in TERI's example a 5 hp motor paid back in 1.2 years.
- Put VFDs where grain size makes the load swing: 6 to 8%.
- Fix compressed air leaks before buying a bigger compressor.
Fossil CO2 per tonne of dal, by mill size (estimate)
- Micro: 128,000 kWh x 0.675 kg = 86.4 t over 5,000 t = 17.3 kg per tonne
- Small: 240,000 kWh x 0.675 = 162 t over 10,000 t = 16.2 kg per tonne
- Medium: 320,000 kWh x 0.675 = 216 t over 20,000 t = 10.8 kg per tonne
- Wood adds biogenic CO2 on a separate line: about 1.75 t per tonne of wood at IPCC defaults
Mill energy from TERI's energy profile of the Indore dal mill cluster (2017-18). CEA FY 2025-26 grid factor. Wood at IPCC 2006 defaults (15.6 GJ per tonne x 112 kg CO2 per GJ), shown for reporting only. Raw pulses' farm emissions are not included and are usually far larger.
What Senseible does here
Senseible turns your monthly electricity bills into fossil CO2 per tonne of dal in minutes. It carries no wood factor, so the dryer wood stays in your own register as a biogenic line.
Sources: TERI, Energy profile: Indore dal mill cluster (SAMEEEKSHA), IPCC 2006 Guidelines, Volume 2 Energy, CEA, CO2 Baseline Database for the Indian Power Sector, version 22.0
Last reviewed 2026-11-01.