The Hindu : Front Page : KSEB holds emergency meeting today

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Wednesday, Jun 25, 2008
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KSEB holds emergency meeting today

P. Venugopal

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) is holding an emergency meeting of its full board here on Wednesday to discuss measures, including the imposition of load-shedding or power cut, to face the crisis caused by deficient rainfall this monsoon.

If good rains continue to elude the State, the KSEB would have no other go but to impose load-shedding or even power cut before the end of this week, a top official told The Hindu on Tuesday. Hydroelectric reservoirs in the State are ringing empty 25 days after the monsoon had made a poor entry into the State on May 31.

The power situation is quite bad in the entire South India now, the official said. This precludes the possibility of the State drawing more energy from the neighbouring States till the crisis blows over.

In fact, there have been days these past couple of weeks when the State could not draw even 40 per cent of its allocation of power from the Central grid, because of shortage in the region as a whole due to various reasons, the official said.

Daily consumption

Daily power consumption comes to more than 40 million units in the State nowadays. With the water level close to the rock bottom in the reservoirs, the KSEB had been regulating the hydropower generation to around 12 million units daily a week ago by putting into the grid as much thermal power as possible from generating stations located within the State and in other States.

But the extreme pressure on the availability of thermal power from outside the State forced the KSEB to increase hydropower generation to the usual levels under the expectation that the monsoon would intensify any day.

On Monday the KSEB generated 19.4 million units of hydropower in the State. It is becoming impossible to sustain hydropower generation at this level, the top official said.

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