While the city has been brought back to power cut regime within three to four months of being exempted from it, consumers should now brace for outages of increased durations in the coming two months.
Central discom officials predict that domestic power cuts in the city might reach up to six hours a day during peak summer this year due to acute shortage in electricity availability.
As of now, the scheduled outages for the city are two hours a day to be implemented in two spells.
Compared to last year, power cuts have been delayed this time round.
While domestic load reliefs were implemented as early as in February last year, this time, they have come a little later.
However, considering that power crisis in the industry has been continuing since last summer, it is no great relief.
After a brief let-up during winter, discom is back to the domestic load relief schedules, too, as the demand for power has been on the rise thanks to rise in temperature.
From nearly 36 million units in the first week of February, power consumption has crossed 40 million units in the Greater Hyderabad limits.
The consumption has shown a marked rise especially during the past one week, forcing officials to resort to power cuts. Adding to the crisis was the reduced generation due to breakdown of units. The unrestricted demand for the APCPDCL will be around 5,400 MW, while after the restriction and control measures on the industry, it hovered around 4,700 MW.
However, the available power being only a little over 4,000 MW as of now, there arose the need to impose load reliefs of around 700 MW.
“Last Friday, the demand in Greater Hyderabad went up to 1,900 MW, about 100 to 200 MW over the normal levels. Now, after load relief schedules, it has dropped to 1,600 MW,” said an official from central discom.
While a lion’s share (40 per cent) of power allotment in the State goes to the CPDCL, the city claims an equally major part of the discom’s allotment.
In essence, about 16 per cent of the total allotment is required to address exclusively the city’s power needs.
While officials are confident of addressing the shortage by facilitating the production of 600 MW of power through expensive Naphtha and RLNG, it is yet to be seen if such additional power will be sufficient to address the Rabi needs poised to peak during March-April. Further, with the rising temperature, power consumption too will spiral in the city, as air-conditioning units will be functioning overtime.
