Several parts of the eastern and western suburbs including Saki Naka, Powai, Andheri, Vikhroli, Borivali, Kandivali, Malad, Versova, Mira Bhayandar were subjected to power cuts on Wednesday after Tata Power’s transmission tower in Airoli collapsed. Consumers of Tata Power and Reliance Energy in these areas are likely to continue facing disruption in their power supply for the next five days.
A Tata Power spokesperson said, “Kalwa Salsette lines 3 & 4 bringing power from outside [Mumbai] has been taken out of service to attend to Tower 26 that collapsed on the evening of June 28. Tata Power is working on providing an alternate route, which may take around five days.”
Since Reliance Energy uses the Kalwa-Salsette lines to source its power requirement of around 750MW from Nagpur, it will have to resort to rotational load-shedding.
According to Tata Power, the tower is likely to have fallen due to methane gas corrosion from the garbage dump at its base, or removal of some structural components by people who frequent the dump, or a combination of both.
In a text message to costumers, Tata Power said, “Damage to a transmission tower of the Salsette Kalwa line through which R-Infra sources large power requirement from outside Mumbai has resulted in power shortage for Mumbai, necessitating load-shedding in certain areas.”
Residents and office employees in these areas were severely inconvenienced as power outages shut down elevators in societies and office complexes.
A Reliance Energy spokesperson said, “In case the repairing of the tower by Tata Power takes longer, Reliance Energy may have to resort to rotational load shedding for another day or two to maintain stability of Mumbai’s power distribution system. We are constantly in touch with Tata Power so as to minimise inconvenience to our consumers and ensure restoration of normalcy at the earliest possible.” .
Calling for a holistic approach towards generating power within Mumbai, a statement from Tata Power said, “This outage again highlights the point that if the generation dependence is largely based on imports and in the event that the technical outage takes place, the Mumbai system becomes unstable and requires load-shedding.”
