Telangana overcomes power crisis with prior plan
Hyderabad: All the antagonists of Telangana, who had virtually spelt doom for the State in the power sector following Statehood, have had to eat the humble pie, given the stellar performance of the young State in the sector. Realising the importance of the energy sector, the startup State focused on improving its power position right […]
Hyderabad: All the antagonists of Telangana, who had virtually spelt doom for the State in the power sector following Statehood, have had to eat the humble pie, given the stellar performance of the young State in the sector. Realising the importance of the energy sector, the startup State focused on improving its power position right from the word go, while the residual Andhra Pradesh has been reeling under crisis forcing the government to declare power holidays.
While at least 16 States in the country, many of them ruled by the BJP, are facing an acute power crisis, Telangana has been ensuring uninterrupted power supply to all crucial sectors — agriculture, industrial, commercial and domestic. Except for minor outages caused by tripping and transmission disruptions, Telangana continues to meet its peak demand without any trouble only on account of advanced planning and efficient management of coal resources.
On the contrary, several States including AP have been drawing power heavily from the grid to meet the demand and have requested the Centre for adequate coal availability for thermal power plants. At present, the coal stock availability in the majority of the thermal power plants in AP will last only for two days. On top of it, the AP government has made no formidable progress in improving its efficiency in handling power generation.
As of Monday, AP power distribution companies could meet the peak demand of about 207 MU. To prevent further crisis, the government has been purchasing around 25-30 MU from the open market.
According to orders issued by the Andhra Pradesh Regulatory Commission (APERC) on April 11, 2022, the government imposed a 50 per cent cut in contracted demand for continuous process industries, one additional weekly power holiday for non-continuous process industries, switching off advertisement hoardings/signboards from 6 pm to 6 am, 30 minutes and one-hour power cut for urban and rural residential consumers respectively, and continuous day-time supply of power for seven hours instead of nine hours for agriculture. These measures will be in force till May 15.
In the case of Telangana, power generation in the State increased from 7,778 MW in 2014 to 17,228 MW in 2022 including an increase in solar power from 74 MW to 4,512 MW during the corresponding period. Over the last few days, the power consumption in the State has skyrocketed and met a peak demand of 204.566 Million Units (MU) without any deficit. On Monday, the peak demand was 215.216 MU and the entire demand was met without much difficulty.
Telangana could overcome the coal shortage by keeping adequate coal stocks available at all its thermal power plants. At present, the State is well placed as far as the coal supply is concerned, with the State-owned Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) meeting the needs.
As against the mandatory buffer stock of coal required for 21 days, all the thermal power generation plants have a buffer stock for at least two weeks. The officials said SCCL has been a backbone for the State’s thermal power plants, besides supplying coal to eight other States in the neighbourhood. Besides ensuring adequate power generation through the State-owned thermal power plants and also prior agreements for power purchase from various power plants, the State government is also purchasing nearly 45-55 MU in the open market, to thwart power shortage.
Further, the authorities made arrangements to efficiently handle the power generation and transmission to meet the growing demand, even before the summer began. The authorities could also reduce Transmission and Distribution losses in Telangana successfully from 16.08 per cent in 2014 to 11.46 per cent during the year 2020-21. While the State’s per capita consumption of power was 2,012 units during 2020-21 as against the national per-capita consumption of 1,161 units.
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