KPTCL braces up to tackle power shortage during summer

Bangalore, Mar 7 (UNI) With Karnataka likely to face a shortage of up to 15 to 23 million units of power a day during summer this year, the Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Ltd (KPTCL) has decided to buy power from captive power plants in the private sector.

The demand for electricity was likely to go up to 140 million units per day from the present 109 MU. The power available was around 115 to 117 MU from the installed capacity of 7,680 MW power generation. ''We will buy power from the private sector who can lend excess power from their generating plants during the peak hours when we feel the pinch of the gap between power availability and generation,'' KPTCL Managing Director Bharat Lal Meena said.

Speaking at a press conference here today, he said the peak capacity required during the current year was 8,823 MW and it was likely to go up to 12,176 MW in five years. New projects that would add 4,321 MW would come up during the next five years and the private sector would build a further capacity of 4,550 MW. The State had also planned to produce 1,690 MW of power through non-conventional energy sources during the next five years.

Mr Meena said villages, which bore the brunt of power shortage due to poor recovery by ESCOMs, would continue to get three phase power for only nine hours a day. Further, they would get nine hours of single phase power and the remaining six hours they would have to 'remain in the dark'.

However, he refused to say that there would be fixed power outages in the State and said the corporation would manage the gap by initiating several steps to help conserve electricity, including availability based tariff (ABT), additional spends to buy power from available sources till the onset of monsoon, loss reduction measures energy audit, implementation of intra-State ABT.

The transmission loss, being reduced gradually, now stood at an estimated 4.18 per cent, while distribution loss, which mainly constituted power theft, stood at an estimated 23.7 per cent. ''We will implement Distribution Automated System as a long term initiative to bring down distribution loss,'' he added.

UNI