With the city continues to simmer under the scorching heat with maximum temperature settling at 47.8 degrees Celsius, the peak power demand in Delhi broke all records of this season, touching to 6,686 megawatt on Monday by 3 pm.

The peak power demand was recorded at 11.23 pm on Monday, a power discom official said. On Tuesday, the peak power demand was 6,679 MW at 3.04 pm, second highest in the month of June.

The mercury shattered all records in Delhi on Monday with parts of the national capital registering 48 degrees Celsius, the highest for the month of June. Delhi’s burgeoning peak power demand is expected to cross 7400 Mega Watt (MW) this summer, power distribution companies have also ramped-up the network capacity by deploying both conventional and innovative solutions to insure uninterrupted supply.

In BYPL’ area of East and Central Delhi, the peak power demand reached to 1540 MW on Monday and 1584 MW on Tuesday. While in BRPL areas the peak power demand touched to 2966 MW on Monday and 2962 on Tuesday. This power demand may further increase during the night hours, the official said.

Meanwhile, Tata Power Delhi Distribution also met the high peak power demand of 2024 MW on Tuesday and 1896 MW on Monday successfully without any network constraint. Last year, the highest peak demand registered in Tata Power-DDL’s area was 1967 MW.

The BSES official said that an arrangement have been firmed up by BSES discoms to source adequate electricity to meet the power demand of over 42 lakhs consumers. These arrangements include long term PPAs and banking arrangements with other states including Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Meghalaya, Manipur and Sikkim, he added.

“BSES discoms will get up to 865 MW (BRPL 550 MW, BYPL 315 MW) of power through banking arrangements. Apart from this, it will get 100 MW of wind power from June 2019 to satisfy the need of its consumers. Of this 50 MW is already being received, he said, adding that in case of unforeseen contingencies because of low generation and outages in power plants, the discoms will purchase short-term power from the exchange.

The official further said that in order to strengthen the distribution network, BSES discoms invested over Rs 800 crore (BRPL — Rs 525 crore, BYPL Rs 300 crore) in FY 2018-2019 and ramped-up the network capacity by around 750 MVA.  BSES discoms also installed (new) and augmented around 600 distribution transformers and laid over 650 Kms of cable to strengthen the network.