The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Automated load despatch centre by April next

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Tuesday, Apr 29, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Automated load despatch centre by April next

Staff Reporter

It will help detect technical snags in the power network and shift load to stabilise the system

— PHOTO: K. GOPINATHAN

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE: V.K. Agrawal (left), General Manager, SRLDC, P.K. Shetty, Director, POWERGRID, N. Santosh Hegde, Lokayukta, and D.G. Sohony of POWERGRID, at a workshop in Bangalore on Monday.

Bangalore: Karnataka will soon have an automated load despatch centre to instantly detect any technical snags in the power network and shift the load to stabilise the system, according to S. Pratap Kumar, Director (Transmission), Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Limited (KPTCL).

The automated load despatch centre will be ready by April 2009, and will be located in Bangalore, with the capacity to receive information from nearly 2,000 feeders from the State, Mr. Kumar told presspersons on the sidelines of a workshop on Grid Security and Management here on Monday.

The centre will be maintained by KPTCL, and the information collected will be passed on to each of the five electricity supply companies, Mr. Kumar added.

P.K. Shetty, Director, POWERGRID and Dean, National Institute for Advanced Studies, speaking at the workshop, said that the most urgent task before the electrical energy industry is to bridge the gap between demand and supply, which is of the order of 13 to 14 per cent during the peak period and nine to 10 per cent in terms of daily energy.

With the steep growth in economy, the requirement of power is set to increase exponentially and the goal of providing access to electricity to all households by 2012 can only be achieved with the combined efforts by all players associated with the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, he added.

“Besides bridging the demand-supply gap, another important challenge is to manage the safety and security of the grid. With the growing size of grids and strong inter-connections, power is traversing long distances, posing challenges to the operating personnel,” he said.

The need of the hour is to augment modern and intelligent controls so that the status about the health of the grid is known to the operator in advance and any dynamic changes are monitored in real time, Dr. Shetty said.

Lokayukta N. Santosh Hegde said that distribution of electricity should be taken on with the ordinary citizen in mind, with a special focus on rural and economically weaker sections of society.

V. Ramakrishna, member (Power System) Central Electricity Authority, said that while the 2003 Electricity Act is supposed to be comprehensive, it does not include several important clauses present in the 1948 Act.

“There are now several litigations over the acquisition of land for power lines because the public are not kept informed about the works,” he said.

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