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A half-an-hour load shedding has been officially announced in the State with the Electricity Minister, Mr Aryadan Muhammed, making a statement to the effect in the State Assembly here on Monday.
An unscheduled load-shedding has been persisted with in the northern districts over the past few days after the State ran into supply bottlenecks cropping up within the State and without.
DAY-TIME RELIEF
The night-time load-shedding schedule has now been brought into effect across the State while the day-time restrictions enforced in parts of the State were lifted on Monday.
Making a statement in the House under Rule 300, the Minister said that the power crisis had been triggered on Thursday (September 29) and certain restrictions had been enforced at random ever since.
This was resorted to after supply problems were encountered at source in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu which had set the State poorer by an estimated 400 MW.
Production at the Ramagundam power plant had had to be curtailed after the Telengana agitation impacted the movement of coal. The Neyveli plant in Tamil Nadu and Talcher plant in Orissa too had developed technical faults.
EXTRA SUPPLIES
The aggregate demand in the State during peak hours is 2,900 MW and while that for the daytime is 2,300 MW, the Minister explained.
During peak hours, the power plants of the public utility Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) produced nearly 1,600 MW while an estimated 680 MW is made available from the Central pool.
The KSEB has now ventured to make available an extra 64 MW costly power from the Kozhikode thermal plant and 85 MW from the Brahmapuram during peak hours, despite the expected drag on its finances.
PEAK-TIME SHORTAGE
This would still leave the State still short of 470 MW during peak hours, the Minister said, and added that efforts were on to get incremental power from the Central pool under the unallocated share system.
The total installed capacity of the power plants is 2,233 MW, of which hydel power stations account for 1,997 MW and thermal plants 236 MW.
As scheduled maintenance work had to be carried out on many generators and plants, they are not expected to work at their installed generation capacity through the rest of the year, the Minister added.
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