DK Shivakumar’ New Year gift: No power cuts in cities

Bengaluru: Urban areas, including Bengaluru city in the state , will not endure dark days as power cuts have been withdrawn beginning the New Year, says energy minister D K Shivakumar.

The state government decided to restore supply of electricity round-the-clock in view of an improvement in power generation, thus ending long-drawn load shedding, which lasted eight hours a day in some places. Power cuts were introduced in September 2015 following low storage levels in reservoirs because of scanty rainfall.

“We have withdrawn load shedding with immediate effect thanks to generation of 1,000 MW power through hydel sources,” said Mr Shivakumar after inaugurating a training programme for junior engineers and junior accounts officers at Hoodi Training Centre on Monday. The minister said the department had resorted to load shedding recently following a gap of 1, 400 MW between demand and supply of electricity. The situation improved in recent days with the state receiving power from Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu. Besides, Karnataka would receive an additional 300 MW of electricity from Damodar Valley beginning April 2016, and 700 MW from the third unit of Ballari Thermal Power Plant and 700 MW from Yaramarus station respectively were expected to be added to the grid soon.

Therefore, the government has decided to restore supply of electricity under various schemes and drinking water units, and seven hours of three-phase power to villages to operate irrigation pump (IP) sets. Of the total 22 lakh pumpsets, nearly one lakh pumpsets were dedicated to drinking water supply. This had resulted in a burden of '7,000 crores on the state exchequer every year.

In order to reduce power consumption, steps were taken up install quality IP sets in future. This scheme was implemented on experimental basis in Malavalli, Doddaballapur and Haveri taluks by replacing old IP sets with new ones, the minister added.