CCEA okays PowerGrid's East-West Transmission Corridor scheme

New Delhi, June 16 (UNI) The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs today gave the go-ahead to implementation of the East-West Transmission Corridor Strengthening Scheme of the Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd (PGCIL) at a cost of Rs 803.70 crore to be commissioned within 36 months from the date of investment approval.

Briefing newspersons here, Union Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee said all constituents of the Western region were beneficiaries of the project.

The transmission project would provide high capacity interconnection between the eastern and western regions, which would help in maintaining security and stability of inter-connected grid under various operating conditions.

The project takes into account a large number of generation schemes like Kahalgaon Stage-II (1500 MW), Barh (1980 MW), North Karanpura (1980 MW), Maithon (1000 MW) and Nabinagar (1000 MW) in the eastern region, which are likely to be implemented during the Tenth and Eleventh Plan periods with beneficiaries located in western and other regions.

In view of the projected load-generation scenario of eastern region in the next five to six years, it is envisaged that a large quantum of power needs to be transferred from Eastern to Western Region.

A 400 kV Rourkela-Raigarh-Raipur D/c line has been proposed to strengthen the existing Rourkela-Raipur inter-regional Transmission Corridor between the two regions to increase the level of power transfer to Western region.

However, to pool surplus power from various generation projects in the Eastern region for onward transmission to Rourkela, a 400 kV D/c line between Ranchi, a pooling point in Eastern region and Rourkela is proposed. This would provide a parallel transmission corridor from central part of the region towards Rourkela.

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