Another new electric peak reached
Power demand in the city touched an all time high of 5,925 MW on Tuesday as a result of the extreme hot and humid conditions prevailing over the past few days. As the power consumption refuses to slip below the 5,500 MW mark, Delhi’s peak power demand now stands as one of the highest among most of the cities in the country; surpassing even the total demand recorded by the seven North-Eastern States of India.
“The maximum power demand in the city was recorded at 5,925 MW at 3.20 pm on Tuesday which is a new record of power consumption in Delhi,” a Power Department official said. The rise in electricity demand caused power cuts ranging from one to four hours. Several areas of East and West Delhi faced outages as the Agra-Gwalior line of the Delhi Transco limited (DTl) got overloaded resulting in its tripping. The affected areas include Geeta Colony, laxmi Nagar, Uttam Nagar, Paschim Vihar, among others.
The previous highest power consumption in the city was recorded on July 11 when it had gone up to 5,810 MW. Power Department officials claimed there was no shortage of power in Delhi and outages were taking place due to problems in distribution network of BSES discoms. According to data provided by the discoms, Delhi ranks on the top for having one of the highest consumption of power beating the cumulative demand of the Seven Sisters of the North-East India. “At 5,925 MW, Delhi’s power demand is almost thrice that of Kolkata (2,100 MW). It is also double that of Mumbai which has a peak demand of around 3,400 MW. Delhi’s demand is also nearly two-and-a-half times greater than the power the seven North-Eastern States draw together (around 2,500 MW). It is almost one-and-a-half times the peak power demand of Orissa (around 3,990 MW) and over two-and-a-half times, the peak power demand of Bihar (2,750 MW),” said a discom official.