Hyderabad, September 26: The APTransco is bringing the industrial sector too under the powercut regime from Monday. It will be total for one day in a week and for four hours during peak hours- 6.30 pm to 10.30 pm- every day.
The power supply situation is becoming precarious. According to officials, the gap between supply and demand is widening. The gap as on September 24 was above 27 million units (MU). This is leading to imposition of power cuts on all sectors.
Unofficial power cuts up to two hours are even imposed on the agricultural sector and supply is given up to five hours in two or three spells to farmers under the 7hour free power cheme.
To tide over the crisis, the Transco is spending money to buy power from outside, import coal and incur revenue loss on account of outages. Besides revenue losses running into hundreds of crores of rupees due to power cuts, several hundreds of crores of rupees is also being spent on purchase of coal and additional power. Till date about `100 crore has been spent on purchase of about 1100 MW of power (28 million units per day) from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Kerala at an average price of about `4 per unit. As for the Singareni Collieries Company Limited, it is accumulating losses to the tune of `18 crore a day (`8 crore in just one district of Karimnagar) as a majority of the over 55,000 workers have been on an indefinite strike since September 13.
The energy sector is experiencing a fall in power generation from the day (September 13) Singareni miners went on strike in support of Sakala Janula Samme call given by the Telangana political JAC. Besides a fall in the thermal power generation due to shortage of coal, the hydel units also produced less power due to lower inflows into the reservoirs.
According to APTransco chairman and managing director Ajay Jain, orders worth about `60 crore were placed for import of about one lakh tonnes of coal for APGenco’s thermal power plants. Another one lakh tonnes of coal, costing about `100 crore, was ordered from Western Coal Limited. Necessary tieups have been made in respect of coal and power purchases.
At present, about 45,000 tonnes of coal was produced at the Singareni collieries in Khammam where the employees’ attendance has gone up to around 80 percent. However, there is no change in the situation at other places- nil attendance at the collieries in Karimnagar, Warangal and Adilabad districts. Of the total output on Sunday, about 25,000 tonnes was despatched to the KTPS at Palvancha, 5,000 MT to NTPC and the rest to private customers which include captive power plants.
–Agencies