Delhi can be insulated against grid disturbance: NDPL

New Delhi, May 10 (UNI) Tata Power, which has successfully insulated Mumbai from frequent power breakdowns due to grid disturbances, today said the same could be achieved in the national capital through ''islanding'' of the city's power supply.

Mr Anil Kumar Sardana, MD of North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL), a subsidiary of Tata Power, said islanding could be done in Delhi by raising the ratio of local generation and grid supply.

At present, if there was any disturbance in the Northern Grid the entire region, including Delhi, was badly hit, resulting in frequent load shedding which had become the order of the day in the past few months, he said.

In this context, Mr Sardana said NDPL would approach with a ''positive mind'' the proposal to set up a 1,000 MW gas-based power plant in Bawana, near here, to bridge the demand-supply gap in Delhi as at present the city was producing only 18 per cent of its electricity requirements, while the rest came from the Northern Grid and the Badarpur Thermal Power Station which was in the process of being transferred to NTPC.

Announcing that NDPL's achievements since its inception in July 2002 met the international benchmarks, he said the company had managed to bring down distribution losses from 53 per cent to 28 per cent as against the regulator's target of 35.35 per cent.

''There is no precedent anywhere in the world for a power distribution company reducing losses by as much as 25 per cent,'' NDPL Chairman and Tata Power Director Adi J Engineer said.

This had resulted in a saving of a whopping Rs 1,500 crore to the Delhi government, which could put this to good use for improving infrastructure ahead of international events such as the Commonwealth Games and the 2011 Cricket World Cup and stepping up spending on the social sector, he said.

Mr Engineer said the reduction of 25 per cent in distribution losses had in fact amounted to bringing down such losses, mainly due to theft, by half which was ''remarkable.'' At the same time, he expressed the need to add dedicated generation capacity to augment power supply in Delhi.

NDPL, which distributed power in large parts of the city, had modernised its distribution network, minimising transformer failures from 11 per cent in 2002 to 0.89 per cent. Provisional billing, which used to be the bane of the consumers, had been reduced to 3.88 per cent against the international benchmark of 3 per cent.

The company was also ready to offer competitive tariff to its consumers and had put forward a proposal in this regard to the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission, Mr Sardana said.

Electricity could be provided on a round-the-clock and 24x7 basis to areas with low distribution losses, subject to approval of the regulator, he said.

The company unveiled plans to introduce round-the-clock online bill payment centres in all its 46 zones following the success of its pilkot project at Rohini.

UNI AR/SN SK KN1700