Chief Minister Jayalalithaa has sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to free up the power transmission corridor to enable the State to get its due share of electricity from the western and eastern regions.
Tamil Nadu’s ‘Long Term Access (LTA) Entitlement’ in the allocation of transmission capacity by the Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL) to evacuate power from the western and eastern regions should not be curtailed, Ms. Jayalalithaa said in a letter.
Pointing out that the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation Limited (Tangedco) had signed 15-year Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) with private producers for 3,330 MW commencing 2014, she said that of this, 2,158 MW was contracted from private generators outside the south. These suppliers had applied for LTA to the PGCIL.
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Ms. Jayalalithaa said that though a 4,000-MW Sholapur-Raichur inter-regional transmission line had been commissioned for transferring power from the western region to the south, the operational limits set by the PGCIL resulted in “only 350 mw flowing to the southern region now.”
Even as the applications for LTA of long-term power suppliers to the Tangedco had been pending with the PGCIL since November 2013, Ms. Jayalalithaa said the Power Ministry allocated an additional 377 MW of ‘surrendered power’ from the Delhi government to Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala, over and above the 316 MW allotted to these States up to March 31, 2015.
This, Ms. Jayalalithaa said, “will adversely affect” Tamil Nadu availing itself of transmission capacity under the LTA, as “even temporary allocation of power from the Central Generating Stations (CGS) is considered equivalent to long- term power for allocation of transmission capacity.”
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Emphasising that the State’s entitlement should not be curtailed, Ms. Jayalalithaa urged Mr. Modi to advise the Power Ministry and the PGCIL to “consider the LTA applications of power suppliers to Tamil Nadu without taking into account the temporary allocation of surrendered power of 693 MW to some of the southern States.”
The PGCIL should also review its ‘transmission reliability margin’ so that Tamil Nadu got “its rightful share of LTA” in inter-grid transfers, she added.