NEW DELHI: The power situation in the Capital deteriorated further on Friday with the demand shooting up along with an increase in the temperature and humidity and the supply remaining abysmally poor on account of closure of some power plants due to non-availability of gas and of others due to maintenance. Any hopes for relief coming in by way of supply from other regions were dashed as the inter-regional availability was zero due to outage of Rihand Dadri Pole I and Pole II.

With the demand crossing the 3,300-MW mark during daytime itself and reaching 3,352 MW by evening, Delhi overdrew about 200 MW from the Northern Grid. But that was not good enough as peak load-shedding was of the order of nearly 850 MW of which 630 MW was in BSES areas and 220 MW was in NDPL areas.

As a result of the rotational load-shedding resorted to by the power distribution companies, many parts of the city went without electricity for three to ten hours. Moreover, as the peak demand on Thursday was recorded past 10 p.m., and the power cuts were most acute late in the night, Delhi appeared headed for another very uncomfortable night.

Residents all over the city complained of long and unscheduled power cuts, saying they disrupted their normal life. At East End Apartments in East Delhi, the cuts lasted over six hours while in Malviya Nagar the situation was even worse as there was no power from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Other colonies such as Prasad Nagar and Minto Road in Central Delhi also reported cuts between two to four hours.

The total outage during the day was to the tune of 836 MW of which 518 MW was forced. This included the gas-fired units of the Gas Turbine, Pragati, Auriya (Gas) and Dadri (Gas) that remained shut down due to non-availability of gas from the gas fields in Gujarat. While this led to a shortfall of about 360 MW of power, the closure of one unit each of Indraprastha, Rihand Power House and Nathpa Jhakri led to loss of another roughly 160 MW of power.

With one unit of the Badarpur Thermal Power Station, which alone provided Delhi 210 MW of power, also lying closed, two months after it had a hydrogen coolant leakage, the Power Department was out of both supply and ideas on how to tackle the issue that has been making the life of millions of residents miserable day after day.

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