"North India facing serious power crunch"
Chandigarh, (PTI): Entire northern India is facing power shortage due to failure of winter rains and less availability of electricity from hydro-generating stations because of less inflow in reservoirs.
"The abnormal increase in demand in all sectors has widened the gap between demand and availability of power resulting into low grid frequency, which is the cause of the unscheduled power cuts," a spokesman for Haryana Power Utilities said here Wednesday.
He said that all possible efforts are on to procure maximum power from all available sources even at higher rates to meet the present demand.
These included liquid fuel power in the range of 100 MW to 150 MW from various gas-based power generating stations located in northern region as well as the western region.
He said that on an average, 623 lakh units of electricity daily had been supplied to consumers during December, 2007 compared to 611 lakh units daily supplied during corresponding month of 2006.
Referring to the State's own power generating stations, he said, on an average, the generating units produced 273 lakh units of electricity daily during December 07 and the Plant Load Factor (PLF) had been about 78 per cent.
One unit of 110 MW of Thermal Panipat has been taken for renovation and modernization.
The spokesman also said that all the three units of National Thermal Power Corporation Project, Ballabgarh had been functional, but due to less availability of gas and liquid fuel, these units are producing about 64 lakh units these days against the normal supply of 95-100 lakh units daily.
He said that the power availability would improve within a fortnight after commercial operation of first unit of 300 MW Thermal Power Project, Yamuna Nagar.
National
