Chandigarh MP Kirron Kher on Tuesday demanded that the Centre should make the city self reliant in terms of power during a meeting with Union Minister of State for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal here.
At present, Chandigarh has no power generation capacity of its own and the city gets power from nearly 28 different central power generation stations in the region.
The city gets around 250 MW from the central pool but during summer, the peak demand mostly crosses 350 MW and to increase the supply, the UT Electricity Department makes short-term buying from other States and also, buys power from power exchanges on daily basis.
This year, the city had witnessed major power crisis during summer and the Electricity Department has failed to meet the gap between power demand and supply.
Sanjay Tandon, city BJP president said that the Union Minister was apprised about the increasing power demand in Chandigarh and how the city denizens are badly affected every summer due to gap in power supply and demand.
He said, “The MP alongwith senior city BJP leaders have demanded that Chandigarh should be made a self reliant city in terms of power generation. At present, the city is dependent on central power generation stations for the power supply.”
The Minister has assured us to look into the matter, he added. Apart from this, the model solar city project of Chandigarh was also discussed. MP Kher urged the Union Ministry to provide more incentives for installation of solar power projects in Chandigarh so as to popularize various solar schemes among city residents.
Meanwhile,Goyal said that Chandigarh may become the first “smart city” in the country as the city already has many components of being smart city. The Union Minister also assured Kher of all assistance to make Chandigarh first smart city of India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government has announced the development of 100 new smart cities in the country.
last year, the UT Administration had announced IT&E Policy to propel Chandigarh to attain the smart-city status in very near future. The IT & Electronics Policy of Administration is in sync with the national policies on IT, Telecommunications, Electronics, Cyber Security etc. And, special emphasis is laid on mapping technology trends, IT-adoption patterns in Chandigarh and feasibility of using upcoming cutting-edge applications of IT for e-Governance.