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Power cuts in Haryana from today
Ruchika M. Khanna
Tribune News Service

Panchkula, July 26
Power cuts varying from six to 12 hours a day will be imposed on all industrial consumers in Haryana, while the urban consumers will face three to four hours of cuts a day.

Though the power supply to domestic consumers in urban and rural areas will not be cut during night time, the power cuts will be enforced during the day. The duration of these restrictions will vary between 30 minutes to one hour in a single slot.

The demand in the agricultural sector has increased considerably due to no rains in the past couple of days. The agricultural consumers will, however, get eight hours of supply, and rural domestic consumers will get two phase power from 7 pm to 5 am, and for two and a half hours in day time. As of now, the total demand in the state is 800 lakh units and the availability is about 740 lakh units.

Because of this shortfall, these power regulatory measures, to come into affect from tomorrow, have been imposed. The forced outage at Singrauli and Rihand power generation units of the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), and three units at Nathpa Jakhri project in Himachal has led to a shortfall of 64 lakh units of power.

Though the state had made bilateral arrangements for buying electricity from the Nathpa Jakhri project (70 lakh units) and Uttaranchal (15 lakh units) from July 1 onwards, but the silt deposition in the Sutlej has forced three power generation units to close down. Haryana is getting only 8- 10 lakh units from Uttaranchal. Even the inter-Regional link from Gujarat for getting power has snapped after the floods in Gujarat and generation being adversely affected there. This has forced Haryana to overdraw power through unscheduled interchange from the northern grid. On an average, Haryana is overdrawing 40-50 lakh units of power from the grid, by paying penal rates.

Sources in the Haryana Power Utilities also inform that the shortage of coal in the state (meant for thermal power generation) too threatens the thermal power generation capacity in the state.

As against the norms for maintaining 15 days’ stock of coal for thermal power generation, the state has coal stocks left for just five days.