Night-time cuts of 6-7 hours or more have been imposed in parts of the city
Hyderabad: Now that the election fever in the city has subsided and politicians are no longer interested in keeping up the pressure on electricity companies to keep power cuts to a bare minimum, long hours of power cuts, especially in the evening and night hours, are back to disrupt the lives of citizens.
The quantum of unannounced power cuts has suddenly jumped in city areas. Night-time cuts of six to seven hours or more have been imposed in parts of the city. Electricity companies blame the cuts on “increased load” that might damage the cables and transformers.
The actual reason for the severe power shortage that has resulted in such massive power cuts in the state and capital city is that the transmission corporation made no attempt to tie up any quantum of the transmission corridor available in the southern region for power purchase.
In fact, the corporation had shown a targeted power purchase tie-up, but without booking the transmission corridor in advance, any power purchased elsewhere will be of no use and hence will be given up eventually.
“The 1500 mw of transmission corridor capacity that is available has been booked by Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which have a relatively smaller power deficit. There was simply no effort made by APTransco to book the corridor in advance and it was repeatedly said during meetings that the situation will improve in June-July automatically,” said an insider.
The state is currently reeling under a power shortage of 55 to 60 mu per day as per official records. Projections made well in advance showed a severe crisis, but despite several closed-door meetings held to discuss the supply shortage by the discoms, no plans for power purchase were made to tackle the situation.
As a result, the entire state is experiencing power cuts of six to 18 hours and the capital city is being subjected to six to 12 hours of unannounced night-time cuts.
A week ago, the entire IT hub saw four days of power cuts at nights. Long hours of night-time cuts are giving citizens sleepless nights in West Marredpally area. Several areas in the old city too are reporting unscheduled night-time cuts.
Asked to account for this appalling situation, assistant engineer (central breakdown) Srinivas Rao said that the unannounced cuts are on account of load increase.
“The unannounced cuts are implemented to prevent cables and transformers from snapping due to load increase,” he claimed.
However, those in the know have a different explanation, for the power-cuts visiting the city again.
The situation is the result of a well planned move of APTransco, which has suppressed the deficit projections as well as the actual deficit figures to avoid making any power purchases.
According to experts, during poll-time, due to huge pressure by local politicians who did not want to antagonise the electorate ahead of election, power officials were forced to curtail the scheduled cuts. But, now that voting is over, there is no such pressure to appease the electorate and hence power cut is back.
( Source : dc )
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