Supply still short, long outages continue in Gurugram

GURUGRAM: In the last 24 hours, the city has witnessed multiple outages ranging from 15 minutes to an hour because of a shortage of supply. Urban consumers have been bearing the brunt of staggered power cuts adding up to four to six hours daily, but industrial areas are seeing longer outages lasting from 8pm to 6am. There are also shorter, unscheduled power cuts that have been disrupting production lines, industrialists have alleged.
Discom officials blamed a sudden increase in demand due to extreme weather conditions and a disruption in supply for the current situation. The city’s peak power demand in April last year was 1,298MW. This year, it has crossed 1,500MW. But it has been getting only 800-900 MW in supply. Officials claimed they were being flooded with calls from consumers about power cuts, but they were helpless because it was not a technical fault that they could fix.
“This time, we had anticipated a load growth (increase in power demand) of 4-5%, but the demand increased by 20-30%,” DHBVN chief engineer Naveen Kumar Verma said.
Residents, especially students appearing for the board exams and people working from home, are struggling to cope with the frequent outages. “Apart from having to deal with frequent power cuts, there was no internet connection as well on Wednesday night. It is just not possible to work in such conditions when most of us are working from home. The internet service provider blamed the prevailing power condition for the technical glitch. The power department needs to get its act together so that residents are spared this harassment,” said Madan Kumar, a Sector 92 resident.
Deepak Maini, the general secretary of the Federation of Indian Industries and the owner of a Gurugram-based factory, said the industries were facing 10-12 hours of power cuts every night. Even during the day, supply is disrupted due to overheating of feeders, he added. More than the prolonged power cuts, unscheduled outages have emerged as a bigger problem for production. “With prior knowledge of power cuts, we can plan production accordingly. But unscheduled cuts are very damaging to business. We are being forced to operate on diesel generators,” Maini said.
“Running factories on diesel generators increases the production cost. Power supply from the grid costs Rs 8-9 per unit, while that from DG sets comes to Rs 25-30 per unit. We have already been hit massively because of the lockdowns. Now, power cuts are causing even more losses to the industrial sector,” he said.
Talking about the discom’s claims of a surge in power demand, Maini contested there was no increase in industrial activity, which is finally back to pre-lockdown levels. “The problem is that they are comparing this year’s consumption with last year’s. The entire country was under lockdown at this time last year and most of the industries were closed or partially operational. So, the consumption was obviously low,” said Maini.
Power minister Ranjit Singh said Haryana was getting around 7,000MW, while the demand was for 7,600 MW. The minister attributed the shortage to multiple factors — the state was supposed to get around 700 MW from Delhi but the re-allocation was stayed by the Delhi high court, one power plant in Khedar isn’t operational due to a technical fault that requires equipment from China, the sharp rise in temperature and lack of supply from private players.
“We are also in talks with Adani Power. They are likely to start supplying 500 MW in the next few days,” he added.
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