Delhi darkroom is developing again

Delhi may be on the brink of another power crisis, with residents from across the Capital facing six to eight hours of outages for the past few days, report HT Correspondents.

Delhi may be on the brink of another power crisis, with residents from across the Capital facing six to eight hours of outages for the past few days.

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Monday was particularly bad with the city shedding around 700 MW power even when the peak demand was around a highly manageable 4,103 MW.

According to the Delhi government’s claims, it can manage demand of upto 4,400 MW.

The power utilities, including the government’s Delhi Transco, claimed neighbouring states had been overdrawing from the pool of Northern grid, forcing the frequency to fall below operable levels, hence the load shedding.

But on Monday, Delhi was the sole culprit, overdrawing around 326 MW of power even as the usual suspects like Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan drew within stipulated quota.

In South Delhi’s Safdarjung Enclave, Panchsheel, Vasant Vihar and Greater Kailash-I and II, power cuts started as early as post-midnight, early Monday.

“Outages are for an hour, several time of the day, even post midnight,” said Pankaj Aggarwal, Secretary general, RWAs Joint Front.

“Looks like distcoms are causing power cuts in the garb of technical problems.”

“When a local phase switch got burnt, BSES took over eight hours to replace it,” said Naina Pandita, resident of East Patel Nagar.

“Two days ago, power was restored 12 hours later.”

The areas services by North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL), which are reportedly, better off than their counterparts under BSES areas, too, joined the club.

“Areas between Rohini Sector one to seven are experiencing around five hours of outages,” said Dr. MK Mohanty, president of federation of Rohini RWAs.

“Delhi’s generation has been around 30 per cent lower these days. On top of that, today there were technical outages,” said an NDPL spokesman.

Reliance’s BSES discoms, which together shed around 500 MW, claimed outages were as per schedule, although residents said power cuts were much more than what distcoms claimed.

On July 1, the city has had peak load 4337 MW, the highest ever in Delhi.