Faced with a shortage of about 31 million units per day, distribution companies in Andhra Pradesh have taken to load shedding for industrial consumers during evening hours apart from the one day power holiday. In addition to power cuts to domestic consumers, AP discoms have formalised one hour supply restriction to agriculture and are also resorting to unscheduled cuts to all sectors depending upon grid frequency. According to AP discoms, while the State requires about 268 MUs per day, it is able to meet the requirement of about 237 MUs, resulting in a demand-supply mismatch of 31 MUs per day.
The load relief is being monitored round the clock and instructions have been given to all the four discoms to enforce one day power holiday and evening load restrictions to all industries and also ensure six hours of power supply to farm sector instead of seven hours of supply assured before.
APTransco has managed to secure additional supplies from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana and also made arrangements of about 11.2 MUs through bilateral arrangements. The APGenco's thermal plants have supplied about 75.36 MUs to the grid, which includes 36.78 MUs from hydel generating stations in the State.
The gas-based plants are able to generate about 1,570 MW against the total capacity of 2,495 MW due to limited gas supplies. Generation from thermal plants of NTPC has also been partially impacted due to inadequate supply of coal.
The Union Power Ministry has allocated 135 MW from the unallocated quota of Central generating stations and Power Grid has helped step up evacuation by 500 MW as a special case based on APTransco's request.