Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

Residents hit by unscheduled ‘power cuts'

MADURAI: With summer having set in early, scorching the city and sending the mercury soaring, the need to use fans and air-conditioners has shot through the roof. However, a spate of unscheduled power cuts has hit the city leaving its residents irate.

These unscheduled outages have compounded the effects of increase in load shedding hours. With effect from Thursday, Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (TANGEDCO) increased the scheduled load shedding hours in urban feeders from two to three hours.

Load shedding had been doubled for rural feeders to four hours.

Residents of Kamaraj Salai said that on Friday, there was a power cut from 4 a.m. to 4.45 a.m. and another spell from 7 a.m. to 7.30 a.m.

This was in addition of the scheduled load shedding. Residents of Visalakshipuram said that there was a spell of power cut in the evening between 4 p.m. and 4.30 p.m. Similar unannounced power cuts have also been reported from various other parts of the city also.

With the summer heat already baking houses in the afternoon hours, the increase in load shedding hours was making the afternoon hours intolerable, especially for children and the aged and elderly people. Parents also expressed concern over that the adverse impact the increased hours of load shedding might have on their children's studies.

Increased demand

A senior TANGEDCO official told The Hindu here on Sunday that an increase of nearly 10 per cent in power demand across the State had forced TANGEDCO to adopt this move as “a temporary measure.”

Further, The demand in Madurai Region, one of the nine in the State, rose from 1,071 MW on February 10 to 1,112 MW on February 16th. The region comprised five southern districts of Madurai, Dindigul, Sivaganga, Theni and Ramanathapuram.

While wind mills were generating some power even as early as last week despite this being off season, it had dropped down on nil output on Thursday morning. With around 4,000 MW of installed capacity, wind power meets a huge portion of the State's total demand of nearly 10,000 MW between May and September.

Further, sources said, surplus power in the market was also increasingly becoming scarce.

“This is a temporary measure that is undertaken to maintain grid security. The situation is likely to be resolved within a week or so,” the official said.

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