TAMBARAM: Alandur Municipality will be taking up an energy audit as part of its initiatives to cut down the expenses incurred on maintaining streetlights and other facilities.
The municipality’s effort is significant, considering that most the urban local bodies’ administrators and elected representatives hardly talk of cutting down expenses incurred on maintenance of utilities, for which a large chunk of tax payers’ money is used.
The local body recently adopted a resolution urging one of the State government’s lending agencies to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR) on how the expenses incurred on maintenance of civic amenities could be brought down. The objective is not only to bring down the electricity expenses but also plug some recurring leakage in the internal distribution of water supply, municipal authorities said.
There are 4,139 streetlights in Alandur, of which 2,750 are ordinary tubelights, 763 are 250-watt sodium vapour lamps, and 60 are 70-watt metal halide lamps. In addition to this, the municipality also pays electricity charges for operating the Main Pumping Station.
The annual electricity charges for these purposes alone work out to more than Rs. 36 lakh a year.
A modest savings of even 10 per cent would help the municipality use funds for other development works.
Municipality officials also expect the DPR to suggest ways to put a permanent end to leakage in internal distribution of water supply from the overhead tanks to subscribers’ houses. Though the supply of water by Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board was sufficient and storage facilities manageable, leakage on the main pipelines and internal distribution system transported water much less than the assured quantity, municipal authorities said.
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