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Speed up the power grid

It is high time the Power Grid Corporation of India expedited putting in place a national power grid. An inter-State grid already exists connecting some parts of the country which the Corporation (PGCIL) uses to evacuate power from the surplus region and feed the deficit region. Among the different zones, the east and the northeast have been identified as surplus. The PGCIL chairman, R.P. Singh, has spoken about a project to draw the world's most powerful High Voltage Direct Current line from Arunachal Pradesh to Agra, a distance of 3,000 km. Aside from providing this 800 kV line, it will link the northeastern State with the south directly. The PGCIL also has plans to inter-link all the regions with state-of-the-art transmission lines in five years. The inter-regional power transfer capacity of the national grid is expected to reach 40,000 MW in another six years and climb up to 1.5 lakh MW by 2017. In addition to providing the transmission links, the PGCIL will be setting up 10 power stations in the southern States over the next two years to receive and distribute electricity in this region. All this will no doubt involve huge investments and the Corporation appears confident of securing assistance from multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

Though some inter-regional transfer of power is already taking place, very few zones in the country have a surplus capacity. Come summer, many of these States resort to load shedding and power cuts, announced or unscheduled, causing hardship to all sections of the consumers. Right now, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in a larger measure, and Tamil Nadu to some extent, are looking for additional power to tide over the peak demand this summer. They are prepared to pay even Rs.6 per unit to bridge the deficit, and look essentially to the Central power undertakings to provide the extra electricity. Fortunately, work on hydel generation projects in the northeast, notably in Arunachal Pradesh, has commenced to ensure that adequate power becomes available when the transmission lines are commissioned by the PGCIL over the next few years. When the line to Agra gets energised, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in particular may stand to gain by way of a share in surplus power from the northeast. But what the Central and State Governments along with their power utilities must realise is that power generation has to be stepped up substantially if the energy demands of a burgeoning economy that aspires to grow at 8 to 9 per cent a year are to be met.

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