Hyderabad gets 4-hour power jolt

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Hyderabad: The entire city sweated its way through four hours of power cuts on Monday as the authorities unofficially doubled power cuts without prior intimation.
The four-hour cuts, “unofficially” imposed due to an emergency, may be lifted if the situation improves, and the city may go back to its two-hour outages. This, however, appears unlikely; Monday’s longer outage was caused by a sudden increase of 40 million units in demand, and the trend could well continue.
Asked why the longer power cuts were imposed suddenly, Central Discom chai-rman and managing director Anil Kumar said, “We could not inform about the increase in the power cuts in advance as an emergency situation cropped up.”
He added that power cuts were being imposed depending on the load factor. “If the situation persists, the power cuts will be rescheduled,” he said. 
The power demand in the state has been stable between 290 and 300 million units per day over the last three days. But the deficit on Monday suddenly shot up to an estimated 90 million units, from 50 m.u. on Sunday.
Though it’s only the beginning of summer, the state will face longer power cuts from April, admitted officials. The rural areas, which are already facing eight to 10 hours of black outs, will face more cuts, they said.
Discom officials said irrespective of the situation, increased power cuts would be implemented for the next two days and a final call on rescheduling the cuts would be taken after that.
Going by the growing power deficit, that could well become ‘official’.
Cities look at 10-hr power cuts in April
A proposal to impose power cuts for up to 10 hours a day in city areas and more in village and district areas has been charted out by APTransco. The proposal has been sent to the energy department for consideration, according to highly placed sources.
Given the huge deficit foreseen in the coming months, with consumption from the domestic sector expected to jump manifold as the use of air-conditioners, air-coolers and inverters increases, the only proposal from the discoms to manage the crisis is to impose more cuts on the domestic sector now.
While the energy department has a clear-cut mandate to supply seven hours of power in one or two spells to the agricultural sector, the proposal says that the seven hours will be reduced in three or even four hours.
The proposal suggests shifting the entire load to the domestic sector. The domestic sector will bear the brunt of the new cuts as the consumption 
from the sector is expected to increase hugely during the summer months and because the districts  are  already subjected to huge cuts.