Power woes continue in India’s national capital

Several areas across the national capital of India, Delhi, continued to face outages for upto three hours due to disruption in supply of power from various generation stations and overdrawal of electricity from Northern Grid by neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. Localities in East and North Delhi were the worst hit as they faced power cuts for almost three hours due to shortage to the tune of around 1100 megawatt from various power stations including NTPC's Dadri (Uttar Pradesh), Singrauli (Madhya Pradesh), Farakka (West Bengal) and Kahalgaon (Bihar) power plants. Continuing coal shortage in theses plants have severely affected power generation. The city government again today requested NTPC to ensure supply of full quota of power to Delhi while directing all discoms to try and procure power from open market even at higher rates. Delhi's current demand fluctuates between 3200 MW to 3,700 MW. The city on an average produces 1,100 MW on its own while the remaining amount is supplied by generating stations outside the city. Delhi Power Minister Harun Yusuf said the situation has become more difficult for Delhi due to overdrawing of power in the range of 1100-2,000 MW from Northern Grid by Uttar Pradesh, which is forcing the city to resort to load-shedding to maintain frequency of the grid, pti reported. Officials said loadshedding took place in several areas of the city due to under-frequency relays in the Northern Grid caused by overdrawing of power by Uttar Pradesh. 'The frequency in the northern grid dipped to 48.5 Hz at some point today against the normal frequency of 49.5 Hz,' they said. Harun Yusuf had yesterday blamed UP for resorting to overdrawal beyond the permissible level and said the city government will write to Union Power Ministry to intervene. The disruption in water supply from Agra canal to Delhi's gas turbine plant at Badarpur as well as cut in generation at Rajghat plant have also compounded the problem. The city got around 900 MW from these two plants against their full capacity of 1,400 MW.  Delhi usually gets 1,400 MW from NTPC's Dadri plant but in the last five days the supply has been in the range of 300 to 800 MW.