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For the first time in the past 3-4 years, industries in Telangana will be facing no power holidays this summer, thanks to the dramatic improvement in the power supply situation helped by a host of factors.
In March last year, industries were subjected to a one-day power holiday, which was subsequently increased to two-day a week in the following month. The situation in the earlier years too was no different for them.
“Power demand remains almost the same as compared with last year. But some advance planning and other factors have helped us in ensuring continuous power supply for the industrial sector during this summer,” D Prabhakara Rao, chairman and managing director of Telangana Genco and Transco told Business Standard.
For a power deficit state, this turnaround in such a short period even though an additional 1,800 Mw of installed capacity is expected to be added to the grid in Telangana only in next 7-11 months.
According to Rao, around 1,050 Mw is being purchased on a daily basis to meet the requirements throughout the summer season. Added to this, there has been a dip in agriculture consumption owing to a shift in cultivation from paddy to commercial crops in some areas of the state, and this has helped the power utilities to augment the supply for other categories of consumers. The power utilities have also shifted the load arising out of agriculture demand to nights in place of day time supply. All these have contributed to improvement in domestic and industrial power supply, according to Rao.
“We were also able to improve the efficiency levels at our thermal power plants resulting in the increase of the plant load factor (PLF) to 80.3 per cent in 2014-15 from 74.46 per cent in the previous year. We were able to generate an additional 1,200 million units (mu) by increasing the PLF,” Rao said. The transmission and distribution losses were brought down from 17.54 per cent to 16.32 per cent during the same period.
Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao recently issued instructions for release of Rs 350 crore to meet any contingency through additional power purchases during this summer.
According to Southern Region Load Despatch Centre data, Andhra Pradesh -- which has been implementing 24/7 power to all the sectors from October last year -- and Telangana met a peak demand of 151.54 mu and 152.20 mu respectively on Friday last week with the latter depending more on drawls from the southern grid. As far as the installed capacities are concerned, the power availability in thermal generation stood at 44.36 mu in Telangana as compared with 88.54 mu in AP.
AP and Telangana have been sharing power generated at their existing plants in a 54:46 per cent ratio in which Telangana was given higher allocation under the AP Reorganisation Act. However, AP has declined to accept a similar arrangement with the recently commissioned 1,600 Mw Krishnapatnam power project of APGenco, as well as from the Hinduja power project, which is about to commence operations.
In this context, the Telangana government hopes to get a major relief in terms of power availability when the 600-Mw Kakatiya power plant of Telangana Genco and the 1200-Mw project of Singareni Collieries Company Limited commence operations later this year.
The Telangana Electricity Regulatory Commission has envisaged a total quantum of 52,000 million units for supply during the current year, which represents an 8 per cent growth in demand over the last year.
