Power cuts due to maintenance work in Bengaluru, nothing official about it

Bengaluru: While residents from several parts of Bengaluru claimed that Bescom under the garb of ‘maintenance’ work, is disrupting power in an unscheduled manner.

They say this looks like load shedding due to a power crisis. But the power ministry maintained that there was no power crisis or load shedding.

“There is no load shedding because of lack of power. If maintenance has to be carried out, then line clearance has to be given, and that has nothing to do with power crisis. There is no question of lack of power. There is sufficient power and in fact, there is surplus power even as we speak,” said P. Ravi Kumar IAS, Additional Chief Secretary, Power Ministry.

“Even during normal days, maintenance works are routinely carried out. There is no question of unscheduled power cuts, but for the maintenance, Bescom would have announced well in advance about the scheduled power outages”, added Mr. P. Ravi Kumar.

While the power department claimed that except for the deficit of 700-800 mw from the Sharavathi power generating station that has shut down for the time being, the city is well prepared on the demand-supply management front and has also taken adequate measures to manage the crisis for the summer, consumers from prominent IT and industrial belts on the other hand stated that unscheduled power outages continued to happen over the past few days in the garb of ‘maintenance’ work.

Few areas with unscheduled power outages were Peenya, Rajarajeshwari Nagar, Banashankari, Richmond Town, Koramangala, Frazer Town, and Whitefield.

“If there are scheduled maintenance works carried out by KPTCL and/or Bescom, we will give line clearance, but we keep the consumers well informed by notifications through newspapers, social media updates, and even on our website. Apart from that there are some restrictions of unscheduled maintenance by the KPTCL because of overloading of transformers. Feeders get tripped when transformers are overloaded and workers will reach the spot to rectify it once they start receiving complaints,” said Jayanthi N. General Manager Customer Relations.

“On Friday morning too, from 10.00 to 2.00, there was maintenance work carried out on the Byadrahalli MUSS line as there were red hot spots at 20 places on that line, and we had given line clearance for the work,” said Ms. Jayanthi, adding, “that cannot be called load shedding as it was maintenance work that we could manage with load restrictions.”