South Delhi residents suffer major power cuts

Residents in major south Delhi areas suffered rampant power cuts due to a variety of reasons ranging from technical snags to power shortfall on Tuesday.

Some of the areas like Anand Lok, Hudco Place, South Extension, and Sadiq Nagar had to remain without power for hours thanks to the tripping of a 220-KV supply line between South Delhi and Lodhi Road as the power demand reached its peak at 3564 MW.

While sources said the line, belonging to Delhi Transco, remained non-operational for hours, senior Transco officials refuted the claim saying it was restored in no time.

Added to that, Delhi’s own electricity generation took a hit when two of its main generators—BTPS and Gas Turbine—were forced into effecting outages. The city’s combined figure of shortfall at the generation level stood at a whopping 350 MW.

While the 282-MW Gas Turbine, serving VVIP areas, fell woefully short of its scheduled figurers due to unavailability of gas, the 704-MW Badarpur Thermal Power Station had to fall short of almost 90 MW in the afternoon because rainfall in the past 48 hours had drenched the coal used as input.

“Due to rainfall, coal arriving at the station has been wet. That has rendered the coal less potent. So production was affected as a large amount of coal cold not be used for hours,” said a senior Power Department official.

In the afternoon, BTPS could muster around 540 MW, way less than its scheduled numbers.

Four units of the Gas Turbine power station, on the other hand has been almost idle for the past few days because it is not getting its quota of gas from Hazira in Gujarat.

The only saving grace could have been the relatively low demand owing to the monsoon, but outages continued due under frequency relays.

For as many as 17 times, distcoms has to resort to trippings duo low frequency of the Northern Grid, the latest one at around 8 PM, which caused widespread power cuts South Delhi areas including Mehrauli and Vasant Kunj.