Coimbatore district continued to reel under long hours of erratic power supply on Thursday and the situation is likely to remain so in the coming weeks.
For the last two days, power cuts in the city have lasted for nearly 12 hours or more a day. Some rural areas did not have supply for nearly 10 hours during day time on Thursday, apart from load shedding at night.
What made the situation worse were the unscheduled cuts. People had no clue when supply would be cut off or restored. Officials of Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (TANGEDCO) here admitted that they did not have a definite schedule.
ADVERTISEMENT
Representatives of industrial associations met TANGEDCO officials on Thursday seeking remedial measures. But there was no respite.
Ordeal to continue
“The indication is that we may have to continue with 12 hours of power cut a day for the next few months. We have sought continuous supply for the remaining hours so that the industries can operate,” says R.R. Balasundaram, president of The Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Coimbatore.
ADVERTISEMENT
A TANGEDCO official told The Hindu that Coimbatore would have to face 12 hours’ load shedding so long as there was no increase in the duration of power cut for Chennai.
The Corporation was trying to come out with a schedule for load shedding.
A note issued by the Corporation in Chennai admitted that on Wednesday, the duration of load shedding was eight to 10 hours in areas other than the city, where one-hour load shedding was being implemented.
Shortfall
It attributed Wednesday’s problem to the shortfall of around 4,000 megawatt which was essentially caused by erratic variation in wind generation.
The wind generation, which was 100 MW in the morning, went up to 2,800 MW in the evening.
In essence, the availability was only around 6,200 MW. This was why additional load shedding had to be forced in the morning even on a government holiday (Vinayaka Chaturthi).
“However, as the wind generation started increasing from 4 p.m., the load shedding was normalised step by step.”
Reasons
The Corporation mentioned the reasons for the increased duration of load shedding — failure of the southwest monsoon and consequent poor storage in hydro reservoirs; shortage of 1,125 MW caused by less production in Central generating stations due to a strike; poor quality of coal at the Talcher generation station; forced outages in other Central generating stations; and denial of 1,000 MW due to corridor constraints.