City shines, but at state’s cost

The power scene in Mumbai seemed to be improving by Saturday, although the situation is set to worsen across the state, reports Dharmendra Jore.

The power scene in Mumbai and its suburbs seemed to be improving by Saturday, although the situation is set to worsen across the state, which will now face another 30 minutes of outages.

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On Sunday, the Mumbai utilities claimed that they have enough electricity to avoid outages in the city and suburbs, even as the state distribution utility Mahavitaran recorded a shortfall of 5,500MW — the highest in recent times.

With this expected to rise further, Mahavitaran has increased loadshedding by another 30 minutes. This will affect the suburbs of Bhandup and Mulund, who will now face outages of four-and-a-half hours, like Thane and Navi Mumbai. Areas like Dombivli and Kalyan will have loadshedding for up to eight hours. In villages, outages would go beyond 14 hours.

However, Mumbai consumers may heave a sigh of relief. Although a Tata Power Company (TPC) spokesperson didn’t respond on Sunday, a Mahavitaran official said that: “TPC is drawing 30 to 40MW from us, which is not much as compared to the 250-300 MW it had been drawing a couple of days ago”. It was reliably learnt that TPC has managed to get 400MW from sources outside the state.

TPC and other utilities had been given an additional five days till Monday to procure extra power.