Nagaland facing acute power crisis

Nagaland is reeling under acute shortage of power supply with almost 8-10 hours of load shedding.

Kohima: Nagaland is reeling under acute shortage of power supply with almost 8-10 hours of load shedding with the state Power department saying that the demand continues to highly exceed the availability resulting in an unstable situation.

Chief Engineer (Power) Er K. Miachieo in a statement said that, due to the huge gap between demand and availability from the allocated sources, the department has been purchasing an additional 20MW from Power exchange since December 2012 to mitigate the shortage, particularly in view of the recently concluded Assembly election and the ongoing High School and Higher Secondary level examinations.

However, he informed that the quantity of this additional purchase is not firm due to restrictions imposed by the North Eastern Regional Load Dispatch Centre (NERLDC) because of Transmission capacity limitation in the NER and prohibitive cost exceeding more than Rs 6.50 per unit at times in a day.

He said the actual availability during November to April peak hours (5 pm to 10 pm) was 60 MW while for off-peak hours (10 pm to 5 pm), it was just 40 MW.
This was in sharp contrast to the actual demand of 110 MW during peak hours and 80 MW during off-peak hours.

While giving the details of how power requirement of the state was met (totaling to 127.80 MW) from ten sources from both within and outside the state, the chief engineer said the allocation was based on the installed project capacity and actual availability during lean season which was only 20 to 40 per cent of the actual allocated share.
The Chief Engineer said the department is distributing the available power by means of coordinated load shedding throughout the State.

Nevertheless, in spite of the best efforts to maintain two hours ON?one hour OFF schedule, he explained that it becomes impossible to maintain the schedule very often since the demand highly exceeds the availability.

PTI

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