Govt to meet demands of agriculture sector

Hyderabad, Dec 25 (UNI) Andhra Pradesh Minister for Energy Mohd Ali Shabbir today said the State Government had taken steps to supply seven hours uninterrupted power supply to the agricultural sector to protect the interests of farmers in the State.

Talking to newspersons here along with Major Irrigation Minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah, he said the APTRASCO had been facing loss of generation capacity of over 1000 MW at the thermal stations for the past few days due to some technical problems at the plants. The hydel generation came down due to reduced reservoir levels in the main reservoir of Srisailam project, he added.

Mr Lakshmaiah said the Government had taken a decision to release additonal 14,500 cusecs of water from the srisailam reservoir to step up power generation at Srisailam power station upto 800 MW and generating eight million units per day.

He said the Government had directed the APTRANSCO to procure power from other states and in addition to overdrawing from the Central Generating Stations. The State was over drawing about seven million units per day at 200 to 800 MW from the central generating stations at a cost of Rs 3.5 crore a day at a cost of Rs five per unit, he added.

He said the power demand in the state had been increased from 140 million units to 157 million units this year. The Government was spending Rs 4.8 crore per day additionally to increase the availability of power in the State, he added.

The Minister said the Government had provided Rs 600 additional funds in addition to Rs 1452 crore budgetary allocation.

He said the Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy had already discussed with the Union Energy Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde for additional allocation of power and allocated gas for the power plants in the State.

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