Tamil Nadu   

“No instant solution to power crisis”

CHENNAI: There is no instant solution to the power crisis in Tamil Nadu, Union Minister of State for Commerce and Power Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday.

Mr. Ramesh, who was here to review the working of the Council of Leather Exports, said the State would get relief once the atomic power plant at Koodankulam was commissioned in six months.

The plants at Kalpakkam and Kaiga were not generating power to their capacity due to fuel shortage.

The Tamil Nadu Electricity Board is awaiting response from High Tension (HT) consumers to its proposal for sharing the cost of power during evening hours if a section of the HT consumers operate their diesel generators.

There are about 7,000 HT consumers and textile mills, who account for 48 per cent of the energy consumption. Diesel generators are mostly operated by the mills.

The rationale behind the idea of sharing the cost of power is to help mills that do not draw power from the grid during evening hours and rely on their generator sets as they will incur greater expenditure on each unit of energy consumed. The question is who will bear the difference between the cost of power generated through generator sets and the cost (Rs.4.20/unit) at which power is supplied by the TNEB during peak hours to HT consumers.

A senior TNEB official says the textile mills want those HT consumers, who do not operate generator sets, to bear a portion of the difference in cost, apart from the government/electricity board absorbing the remaining portion.

Discussions are on among all HT consumers and a concrete response is expected on Friday, the official says, adding that about 1,200 megawatt of power is the expected relief in the event of implementation of the proposal.

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