The Hindu : New Delhi News : No let-up in Capital power cuts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 23, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

No let-up in Capital power cuts

Sandeep Joshi

Transco's own generating units not working efficiently

NEW DELHI: The "ambitious'' summer action plan of the Delhi Government notwithstanding, large parts of the Capital continued to experience long hours of unscheduled power cuts on Sunday. And with temperature rising, the situation is unlikely to improve soon.

During the past week, the Delhi Transco Limited was unable to supply adequate power to the two private distribution companies mainly due to shortfall in supply to the Northern Grid from various generating units. To add to the power woes, even Transco's own generating units in the Capital were not working efficiently, depriving the city of crucial power. That is not all, the failure of the private power distribution companies to promptly address local faults and other technical problems have made things worse.

Load-shedding carried out by Transco during the past week has been between 400 MW and 100 MW, and this has generally been attributed to deficient supply to the Northern Grid. On May 17 and 18, technical problems in the Naptha Jhakri hydropower plant in Himachal Pradesh caused a shortfall of around 1000-1500 MW in the Grid, affecting the entire Northern region. Similarly, on May 19 supply to the Grid was again curtailed as two units of the Dadri thermal power plant and one unit of Narora atomic power plant, both in Uttar Pradesh, had to be shut down due to technical reasons.

On May 20 too at least six units of four power plants remained shut leading to shortfall of over 1,500 MW to the Northern Grid. In Delhi, one unit of Badarpur thermal power plant and two units of Indraprastha plant remained shut, while two units of the Singrauli thermal power plant in Uttar Pradesh and one unit of a Rajasthan-based plant also did not produce power resulting in less supply to the Grid. And on May 21, shutting down of two units of the Indraprastha power plant curtailed Transco's generation, closing down of one unit each of Dadri and Singrauli in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh reduced supply to the Northern Grid.

Low frequency

Shortfall in supply to the Grid is not the only problem, the failure of the nine Northern Sates connected to the Grid, including Delhi, to maintain "grid discipline" has continuously plagued the Gird with low frequency, resulting in load-shedding. In case of crisis in the Grid, even if one State draws more power than its allotted quota, it aggravates the problem and has a cascading affect on all the other remaining States.

Though in its summer action plan, the Delhi Government has claimed that the total availability of power during summer would be around 3500 MW to meet any crisis situation, the peak demand in the Capital, however, has remained only between 2900 MW and 3100 MW so far.

Under the action plan, the total availability of power has been projected at 3595 MW during May, 3630 MW in June, 3571 MW in July, 3611 MW in August and 3493 in September, more than the anticipated average demand of around 3500 MW during the five months of summer season. Despite this Transco going for load-shedding on a daily basis raises serious question marks over the Government's planning. Moreover, Transco's request to the Union Ministry of Power to increase the allocation from unallocated quota of power from the existing 22 per cent to 35 per cent during peak hours to ensure additional availability of 100 MW has also failed to materialise.

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