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Home > Business > Business Headline > Report

Power crisis looms over drought-hit Karnataka

Fakir Chand in Bangalore | December 11, 2002 19:45 IST

Come summer, Karnataka might lose its dominant position as an attractive destination for foreign and private sector investment due to an impending power crisis.

Sounding alarm bells over the bleak prospects of generating enough power to meet peak demand across the state in the coming months, Karnataka Chief Minister S M Krishna told rediff.com in Bangalore on Wednesday that the state would have to outsource power from the national grid and the neighboring states.

A failed south-west monsoon has put paid to many of the southern state's plans. "Poor rainfall and the resultant drought-like condition in several parts of the state have depleted water levels in reservoirs. The situation will be grim. We will have to mobilise additional resources to buy the required power," Krishna stated.

The chief minister said that the supply of power was not as much a problem as was generating the resources to buy it. "We will have to keep a balanced view on how much we can buy and where from."

Krishna assured that the state was readying a contingency plan to tackle the approaching crisis. He hinted at imminent power cuts and unscheduled load-shedding in urban and rural areas, if the supply of electricity does not match the demand.

"It all depends on the demand-and-supply position. We are making an estimate of the requirement during the coming months till the next south-west monsoon in June-July, 2003. The government is also making an assessment of the power sources available for buying," Krishna asserted.

Asked whether the state would buy power from the Dabhol Power Company at the same price (Rs 2.86 per unit) as the Maharashtra government has agreed to buy it for, Krishna said 'the government would take power from wherever it was available cost-effectively and affordable.'

"We will have to take into account many factors such as the demand and supply ratio during the peak season, and how much power would plants across the state be able generate on their own at peak load factor," Krishna said.

The chief minister, however, declared that the state grid would be getting an additional 5 million units of power from the seventh unit of the Raichur Thermal Power Plant from this week, which has been commissioned in a record time of 25 months at a cost of Rs 613 crore (Rs 6.13 billion).

Regretting the poor participation of the private sector in power generation in the state, Krishna said due to the economic downturn and financial scams in the United States, independent power project companies had backed out.

"I am disappointed that the private sector has not come forward to set up power projects in view of the incentives and speedy clearances we have offered," Krishna lamented.

Unfortunately, many of the power companies with whom Karnataka was negotiating for setting up projects in the state have either folded up or been declared bankrupt.

One of them who pulled out is Light Power Corporation of Hong Kong, which stepped in after the US-based Cogentrix withdrew from a 1000 mw gas-based project.

As a result, the state government has turned to the public sector undertakings such as the state-owned Karnataka Power Corporation Ltd to augment power generation from hydel and thermal resources from Raichur, Bellary, Almatti, and Bidadi.

Krishna said the state government had agreed in principle to allow RTPS to go ahead with the eighth unit project to generate an additional 210mw of power in the next couple of years.

KPCL sources, however, told rediff.com that power generation from hydel sources would be much lesser than last year in view of the depleting water levels in the catchment areas where the hydel reservoirs are located.

Reeling out facts and figures, a KPCL official said though the total hydel generation capacity was 2876mw at 75 percent load factor, the energy outflow this year had been around 6195 million units against the average output of 9497 units.

"The shortfall in power generation from hydel sources due to poor monsoon and depleting water levels in the reservoirs will be 3302 million units till June 2003," the official disclosed.

As against an average inflows of 287tmcft (thousand million cubic feet) in the state, the flow this year has been only 187tmcft.



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