While there is no doubt that the number of “no power supply” complaints have significantly increased this year, however, the Delhi Government, as well as the power companies, have maintained that there is no shortage of power in Delhi. Regardless of this assurance, there has been no let up in the woes of the consumers as power cuts attributed to “local faults” have remained to be the norm this year rather than exceptions.
From unauthorised colonies to posh localities, and from the outer areas of Delhi to the prime central areas, people have been complaining of erratic power supply that seems to be following the trend of the mercury.
“The battery of our inverter was lying dead for years because we never felt the need to buy a new one since the power supply in the city used to be quite reliable. But this year, there have been so many frequent power cuts in this scorching heat that I had no option but to get the battery replaced,” said Rakesh Sharma, a resident of Kalkaji.
Talking about the issue of power cuts, a BSES official said that while there is sufficient power available, but “unprecedented” growth in load in some power-theft prone areas has led to some complications.
“Unprecedented load growth in high power theft areas (e.g unauthorised colonies) is leading to trippings and ‘burn out’ of equipments in adjoining regular areas,” the official said.
The BSES official added that an important reason for outages has been continuous high temperatures and resultant unprecedented power demand round the clock, including during nights not giving electricity network sufficient time to cool down. “This is stressing the network and leading to an increase in faults. Outages are also happening on account of lack of space for installing distribution network impacts power supply in unauthorised colonies,” he added.
A senior Tata Power official said that the main reasons for the power cut during summer is transformer overload, cable failure and transient fault on account of sudden weather disturbance like storm and rain.
“In case of failure of transformers, we restore the supply by installing mobile transformers. Transformer failure on account of oil theft and leakages has been controlled to the best extent by implementation of DTMS (Distribution Transformer Monitoring System) comprising of hooters and oil level switch to annunciate and isolate appropriately,” said TPDDl CEO Praveer Sinha.
He further added that TPDDl also uses new technology adoptions like infrared scanning and ultrasound scanning for predictive maintenance.
“Every year, we perform infra-red scanning of all the power transformers and distribution transformers to identify hot spots. Similarly, ultrasound scanning is done on 5,000 switchgears like ring main unit, circuit breaker installed across TPDDl to identify electrical discharges,” he added.
BSES officials said that BSES discoms have undertaken several additional measures to address the situation in the last few days including augmenting of call centre head up by around 50 per cent, additional numbers (with additional lines) for registering ‘no supply’ complaints, deployment of 200 additional people to monitor faults and restore power supply, emergency control room to monitor faults 24x7, Quick Response Teams for faster resolution of complaints and hot spot scanning to detect faults in the equipment at the grid level.
Meanwhile, state-run Delhi Transco limited (DTl) has blamed Reliance-backed discoms BSES Rajdhani Power limited (BRPl) and BSES Yamuna Power limited (BYPl), saying that non-payment of dues by the two discoms was hampering operations and maintenance activities.
“The outstanding dues, as on date, stand at over Rs2,000 crore. Non receipt of payments has put constraints not only in future expansion plans, but also affecting day to day maintenances,” officials said.