PSEB ties up with MP for 24 lakh units from today
With Parliament elections round the corner, the Punjab Government has asked the Punjab State Electricity Board (PSEB) to reach out to other States and beg or buy power to meet the needs of the State. The PSEB has started contacting other States and managed to get 24 lakh units from Madhya Pradesh from Monday. PSEB Chairman YS Ratra said on Sunday that he had taken up the matter with Vaish, Managing Director of Madhya Pradesh Power Trading Company, and he had assured to supply 24 LUs per day from Monday onwards. What's more, Vaish has also promised to increase the supplies as and when the situation in MP improves. The PSEB is also learnt to have approached J&K, Sikkim and Tamil Nadu to increase/restore supplies to Punjab. Meanwhile, Ratra has appealed to the consumers to bear with such exigencies. He has expressed the hope that the situation would improve with normal rainfall in August. Increased generation should help improve supply and the consumers will get relief from longer power cuts. PSEB sources confided in The Pioneer on Sunday that Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal had pulled up Ratra for not taking up the issue of purchase of power with other States. He is learnt to have conveyed his feelings to the PSEB in unmistakable terms. Badal has been facing lot of flak for not managing adequate power supply during his one-and-a-half-year tenure. There has also been an opinion in some circles that during the tenure of his predecessor Capt Amarinder Singh, Punjab did not face any power deficiency. Badal has been blaming previous Congress Governments for the power crisis in Punjab but there have been few buyers of this theory. Some keep praising the previous Congress Government for ensuring continuous power supply, never mind the high price at which it was purchased from other states. Ratra has appealed to the consumers to minimise the use of ACs, which is a major cause of increase in demand for power, and replace their normal bulbs with CFLs to reduce peak load demand. He has also appealed to the agricultural consumers to keep their shunt capacitors in working order and use CFLs on tubewell kothas. He said that the PSEB was forced to impose longer power cuts in July due to constraints. Due to scanty rainfall in southern and western region of the country, States like Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra withdrew 72 LUs per day from the total contracted power of 267 LUs per day. The board used to get full contracted supply in earlier years during the paddy season. The average availability of power in July fell to 1478.28 LUs whereas the demand was 1,712 LUs. On July 30, the demand was 1,871 LUs, the highest ever recorded so far. On an average, power cuts of five hours were imposed in July at the district headquarters, 5.45 hours in urban feeders, five hours in main cities, six hours in urban (3 wire) and five hours in urban (4 wire). Ratra said that because of outages in the central sector, power projects such as Singrouli, Rihand and Unchahaar, the PSEB lost its share of about 30 LUs per day. The BBMB is also not releasing full capacity of water from Pong Dam, affecting power generation to the tune of about 20 LUs from the Mukerian Hydel Project. The PSEB has arranged 10,021 LUs for the month of August, under purchase and banking from inter-regional sources. However, due to continued subdued monsoon in the southern and western region States like Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra have so far withdrawn supply totalling 3,217 LUs. The current shortfall on account of this withdrawal is 167 LUs per day.
