Jayalalithaa reduces power cuts
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Chief minister J. Jayalalithaa on Friday announced slashing of scheduled power cuts by an hour for Chennai and the rest of the state and doing away with power holiday for industries.
After holding a detailed review meeting on the power situation in the state, she said load shedding in the city would be reduced to one hour from the existing two hours while the rest of the state will have three hours of power cut as against the existing four hours.
She also said the one-day power holiday in a week and compulsory power holiday on Sunday for high tension and low-tension industries would be done away with.
Electricity minister Natham R. Viswanathan, electricity secretary Ramesh Kumar Khanna and Tamil Nadu Electricity Board chairman Rajeev Ranjan attended the review meeting.
Ms Jayalalithaa said power situation in the state has improved as power generation through windmills has increased during the last few weeks.
She said Mettur Thermal Power Station, which was shut down following a fire accident on May 10, has also started generating full capacity of 840 MW.
With work underway on the thermal power stations and Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant to be commissioned soon, the present restrictive measures would be gradually relaxed, she said, adding that a review meeting would be held next week.
Windfall for TN as power cuts slashed
The state government has relaxed load shedding for domestic consumers and industries as a result of increase in wind power generation.
The generation from windmills has picked up and it has been hovering around 3,000 MW in the last few weeks. On May 30, the wind power generation touched 3800 MW.
“We are on an average getting 3000 MW a day. The peak wind season is between May and October. We hope the generation will be good during the rest of the season,” said a senior Tangedco official.
The state has installed capacity of 6,696 MW of wind energy, which is 41 per cent of the country’s total capacity.
The winds have come to the rescue of the corporation as it could not purchase power from the northern states due to clogging of transmission lines and delay in commissioning of thermal plants under construction.
A Tangedco official said that the first unit of the 3 x 500 MW NTPC-Tangedco joint venture project at Vallur would go on stream by June end and the second unit would be commissioned by September 12. The state would be getting 345 MW of power each from the three units.
The 2 x 600 MW North Chennai Thermal Power Station (NCTPS)-stage II would be commissioned by July and it will start functioning with full load from August.
The second unit of NCTPS would be commissioned by October 2012. When it is fully operational, the state would get the entire load of 1200 MW of power.
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