The Hindu : New Delhi News : Power situation in Capital improves

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 20, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

Power situation in Capital improves

Staff Reporter

Many closed units now in operation

NEW DELHI: Though the demand for power shot up substantially in the Capital on Saturday, reaching a high of 3,683 MW by 7 p.m., the intensity of power cuts came down somewhat as many of the power units which had been lying closed became operational and a transmission line was also restored thereby leading to better availability of power.

As against the peak demand of 3,360 MW on Friday, the demand crossed 3,600 MW during the afternoon on Saturday. However, with the Rihand-Dadri Pole I returning to service at 3-23 p.m. , the forced outages dropped from the level of around 800 MW during the past week to 451 MW.

Meanwhile, barring the Gas Turbine, Pragati Auriya and Dadri gas-fired plants, and one unit of Nathpa Jhakri and Indraprashta, all the other units returned to operations.

Even in the case of the planned outages, many of the units were restored and the total outage level dropped to 274 MW, a major chunk of which was due to the 210 MW unit of Badarpur Thermal Power Station which has been lying shut due to hydrogen coolant leakage for nearly a couple of months now.

With the supply of power improving during the day, the impact of the increased demand was not much till evening. However, as the trend has been of peak demand late in the evening, the frequency and duration of cuts were expected to go up.

During the day, however, the power cuts were few and far between. Colonies such as Mayur Vihar, Prasad Nagar, Rohini, Sarita Vihar and Patparganj, which had been experiencing between four to six hours of cuts during the past few days, reported about two hours of cuts since midnight.

In the unauthorised colonies too, where the duration of the load-shedding had been much longer and cuts of between six to ten hours had become a norm during the past week, there was some respite as the duration of cuts was reduced since the distribution companies did not have to resort to heavy rotational load-shedding.

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