The Aam Aadmi Party on Wednesday issued a “White Paper on Punjab Power Scenario” alleging that it exposed the real story behind the much hyped claim of making Punjab a “Power Surplus State”.
The party also alleged “massive irregularities” had taken place and it led to doubling of electricity rates in last nine years of Akali-BJP Government in Punjab.
The paper released by AAP spokesperson and senior leader Chander Suta Dogra and head legal wing, Himmat Singh Shergill brought out annual loss of Rs 3745 crore, as a result of a special power generation policy for private power plants and faulty power purchase agreements (PPA) under which the Government was not only paying huge sums to private thermal power plants (Talwandi Sabo, Rajpura and Goindwal Sahib) as fixed capacity charges, for sitting idle during low demand periods, but purchasing expensive power from them at other times.
State-owned thermal power plants that produce cheaper power are forced to produce less than half of their capacity. As against their capacity to generate more than 17000 Million Units annually, they will be generating only 7308 Million Units in 2016-17, so that state can buy more power from expensive private producers, the AAP alleged.
The leaders said the Aam Aadmi Party will review these agreements and the Power Generation Policy of 2010 and get a high level investigation done to fix accountability of those who are responsible for it.