Power to be bought from other states
Ruchika M Khanna
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 12
Haryana has made emergency arrangements to buy 105 MW of power from other state electricity boards and private traders from tomorrow onwards.

In order to deal with the severe power shortage, the state will also purchase 400 MW of power through the India Energy Exchange (power exchange). Reeling under a power shortage, the state received a setback today after the Gujarat government took a drastic step to ban all power supply by its state electricity board as well as private traders in their state to other state governments.

Haryana was buying 250 MW of power from the Gujarat State Electricity Board and another 100 MW was to flow to Haryana through a private trader in Gujarat.

With this shortage of 250 MW and the outages in generating plants in Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, which has stopped inflow of 100 MW and 250 MW, respectively, the state is suddenly short of 500 MW of power.

“Thus, as an emergency measure to make up with this loss, we have decided to buy 30 MW from Assam, 50 MW from West Bengal and 25 MW from the Bhilai Steel Plant. We will also be trading actively on the power exchange and will be making day-ahead purchases of 400 MW daily to meet the power requirement,” said a senior official in the state power utilities.

“As against a demand of 1,240 lakh units a day, the power supply in Haryana is around 1,170 lakh units a day. Thus, power restrictions have been imposed on all categories of consumers - rural, urban, agriculture and industry. However, after buying this additional power we will be able to ensure eight hours of supply to agriculture, 13 hours to rural, 16 hours to industrial and 20 hours to urban domestic consumers,” he added.

Concerned over the power crisis in the state, Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda too has written a letter to the Union Power Minister urging for an allocation of additional power for Haryana from the unallocated pool of the central generation. In response to the request, 87 MW was allotted to Haryana from the central pool, but the actual power coming to Haryana is only 40 MW.

The Chief Minister has again taken up the matter with the Union Power Minister, informing him that the monsoon situation in the state is grim. Any failure to supply adequate power for agriculture will have serious implications not only for farmers of Haryana, but also for the food security of the country. Thus, the Chief Minister has requested to allocate 400 MW of power out of the unallocated pool,” said a senior official.

He said as against a sum of Rs 947 crore reserved for buying power through long-term and short-term power purchase arrangements last year, the state would be spending Rs 1,997 crore between June and September this year.