Fossil fuels, coal, and natural gas, contribute a major share of electricity generated in India as well as the world and will continue to do so well into the future. With the justified concern of their rapid depletion and the environmental impacts associated with their large-scale use, there is a quest for advanced coal-fired power generation technologies which are energy efficient and environmental friendly. This study analyses the thermodynamic performance of an existing 62.5 MWe conventional Rankine cycle power plant using pulverized coal firing (PF) (reference plant with atmospheric pulverized coal combustion) repowered with a new and potentially advantageous technology, namely, pressurized pulverized coal firing in a combined cycle (PPCC) power plant. The performance of power plants is determined based on energy and exergy analysis. The energy and exergy efficiencies of the PF plant are estimated to be 28.3 and 25.9 per cent, respectively, whereas the PPCC power plant results in a significant increase of 6.3 and 5.7 per cent points, respectively, over the PF plant. Moreover, PPCC power plant results in an increase of about 2.6 times in the gross plant output (162 MWe) compared with the PF power plant. The gas turbine alone contributes to an additional 100 MWe when the steam turbine output is maintained constant at 62.5 MWe as in reference PF power plant.