Power cuts from today

BHUBANESWAR: From Sunday, there will be scheduled power cuts adding to the woes of the people already reeling from sweltering heat.As such with mercury soaring and the summer becoming harsher, frequent load-shedding and long-duration of unscheduled power cuts across the State have made life miserable.While the State is reeling from acute power crisis, the sudden outage of one of the two units of Sterlite Energy, Jharsuguda, from the State Grid on Thursday has further worsened the situation. Sterlite was supplying 350 MW from the first unit of its independent power project. The unit was shut down due to some technical snag and it will take a couple of days to bring back the unit to normalcy.The gap between the demand and the supply has further widened as three more units of NTPC’s power plants in West Bengal and Bihar went out of Eastern Region Grid due to technical snags. The State is getting less than its share from the Central sector as two units of NTPC’s Farakka Thermal Power Plant in West Bengal and one unit of Kahalgaon Super Thermal Power Project in Bihar have stopped generating power.With an average demand of about 2,800 MW and peak demand of 3,300 MW, the State is facing a peak shortage of about 700 MW. The huge gap in the demand and the supply position is primarily due to poor hydro condition in major reservoirs of the State, said Atanu Sabyasachi Nayak, Minister of State for Energy. The sudden shortfall of 350 MW has forced the power distribution utilities to go for official power regulation from Sunday.The Minister reviewed the power situation at a high-level meeting here on Saturday. The captive generating plants (CGPs) in the State, which have been supplying 500 MW, have been requested to provide an additional 200 MW by upscaling their generation capacity, the Minister said. The Sterlite (a subsidiary of Vedanta Group) and Vedanta are currently supplying 77 MW and 25 MW to the State respectively from their CGPs.Generation from the hydro power stations has come down drastically due to poor hydro conditions in the reservoirs. The State is now getting about 200 MW of hydro power as against 600 MW during the corresponding period last year, the Minister said.Even as the State Government has requested the Centre for additional allocation of 500 MW from  the Central pool to tide over the crisis situation, the latter is unable to meet the State’s request as power situation is more acute in southern states.