After facing flak for delay in fixing accountability for the May 30 storm, leading to major power blackouts in the city, the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) on Tuesday announced that it would certainly be proceeding with the case next week.
Highlighting the delay, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Sunday called for more accountability of the power regulator towards the public. The party that made power and water an election issue had demanded that the law that guides the functioning of the DERC should be amended to make the panel accountable to people.
“In order to ensure that the defaulting stakeholders concerned are made accountable for the series of long power outages, we will hold a hearing in the case next week,” said J.P. Singh, member, DERC.
While explaining how the case will be taken forward, Mr. Singh said, “We will find out how and why it [the power outage] happened. And if need be, we will ask the stakeholders to provide us with evidence to substantiate their claims.”
“It is not that we were delaying things. The Delhi Transco Limited had asked for time in submitting a detailed reply. If required, we will penalise the defaulting stakeholders,” he added.
Taking suo motu cognisance of news reports on power crisis here, the DERC had registered a case as it also works as a quasi-judicial body and had issued show cause notice to all the stakeholders — BSES Rajdhani, BSES Yamuna and Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited, and transmission utility Delhi Transco Limited (DTL).
While issuing the show cause notice, the regulator had asked them to respond as to why appropriate action should not be taken against them in accordance with the provisions of the Electricity Act, 2003.
The commission in its show cause notice had taken a serious note of the power supply failure and expressed its displeasure to the DTL and discoms for delays in execution of approved schemes by them.
“This was largely due to failure of transmission and distribution companies’ augmentation, upgrade and proper repairs, and maintenance of existing infrastructure, which includes transmission and distribution lines and transformers,” the regulator stated in its notice.
However, the discoms, in their replies submitted before the regulator blamed the DTL for the power failure.
“The discoms have blamed the DTL for the power crisis, which they claimed happened essentially because of its failure to augment and strengthen the transmission network,” said a source. The regulator had in its notice taken notice of the failures of the DTL, as it has the primary responsibility of maintaining the transmission infrastructure.
