Hyderabad: Despite year-long power shortages and outages for maintenance, the city gets no respite from power disruptions.
Many areas continue to experience power cuts and disruptions in the name of maintenance. This, despite the fact that the state is having a surplus of energy.
Sources say the reason is not just maintenance, but pilferages resulting in maintenance problems. The pilferages are recorded as transmission and distribution losses by the discoms. The discoms have not succeeded in containing this over the last decade.
While maintenance issues keep cropping up every now and then in certain areas, the feeder breakdowns are due to energy pilferage, highly placed sources said.
“Breakdowns are a regular thing once in a while, but in many areas, especially in the south circle of APCPDCL, and many areas where building constructions and festivities are going on, illegal connections caused trouble. This is one of the main reasons for frequent breakdowns in many areas and as a result a large part of the area suffers,” said a highly placed source.
Despite all out efforts to bring down transmisson and distribution losses in the power sector, the city still continues to have around 20 per cent transmission and distribution losses.
Even though transmission and distribution losses have come down to seven and 10 per cent in the North and Central circles, the South circle continues to register 48 per cent losses year after year.
While the actual transmission and distribution losses may not be over 10 per cent, the inability of the discoms to check transmission and distribution losses is due to corruption at various levels.
“There is rampant meter tampering. Many households have consumption readings as low as 0-15 units per month. In many parts of the city very few households have readings above 200 units although they have all kinds of high wattage electrical gadgets,” an official said.
