B.S. Satish Kumar and

Chitra V. Ramani

BANGALORE: The Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Limited (KPTCL) has enforced one-hour scheduled load shedding from Tuesday. All areas in the State, barring Bangalore city, will face load shedding for 30 minutes each in the morning and in the evening on rotation to make up for the huge shortage in availability of power.

Sources in the KPTCL told The Hindu that it would be enforced in two time slots — between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., and 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

At present, the power consumption has touched a little over 5,900 MW in the State. But the State can supply only 5,300 MW of power from all the sources including supply from the Central Generating Stations and Independent Power Producers.

It has been decided to enforce load shedding during the peak hours when the shortage levels too increase. Sources said that at a board meeting held recently, the decision was taken to empower the chief engineers of the electricity supply companies (ESCOMs) to enforce load shedding. However, if the load was unmanageable, load shedding would be enforced even in Bangalore city.Unscheduled load shedding has been enforced for quite some time now during peak hours in several villages and towns as and when the shortage levels increase rapidly.

This was an informal arrangement with load shedding enforced mostly in those areas where revenue recovery was low. However, now all the areas barring Bangalore, will face load shedding in rotation during peak hours.

The average daily power consumption has touched 135 million units (mu) in the past few days. What has made matters worse is the problems at the Supa hydel generating station and technical problems at the thermal power plant in Talcher.

This has resulted in non-availability of about 150 MW of power to the State.

The problems with respect to the Supa station are expected to be solved in about a week to ensure the availability of 50 MW of power.

But the State's share of 100 MW from Talcher is expected to be available only after a month as it will take a long time to deal with the technical snag.

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