E-Paper
Acute power crisis grips Nepal for second consecutive winter
Residents in most parts of Kathmandu Valley woke up to a cold and powerless on Wednesday morning as Nepal Electricity Authority began its 51-hour weekly power outage across the country.
Residents in most parts of Kathmandu Valley woke up to a cold and powerless on Wednesday morning as Nepal Electricity Authority began its 51-hour weekly power outage across the country.
Power cuts which nearly doubled from the existing 28-hour per week as a result of low water level in rivers is severely affecting the Himalayan nation for the second consecutive winter.
While the current demand for power is 845 MW, the NEA is also to provide only 450 MW to consumers due to reduced generation.
Nepal, which has several large and small rivers crisscrossing the country, has a potential to generate nearly 80,000 MW of power, but only a fraction of it has been exploited.
In 2008-09, NEA owned power stations generated 1839 GWh of electricity. Lack of political stability, natural causes, technical exigencies and the 10-year-long civil war are reasons for the large gap between supply and demand.
Last winter too, the country had witnessed 16 hours of load shedding per day forcing the government to announce a National Electricity Crisis—the first time in Nepal’s century long power generation history.
Failure to supply a peak power demand that rose by over 12.5 percent to 812 MW in January this year led to angry retort from consumers who locked NEA offices, damaged property and even assaulted employees.
And despite NEA’s assurance of minimizing the crisis by “strategic option” this year, it seems unlikely the over 1.7 million consumers will get any respite from the daily power cuts of 7-8 hours and more in coming weeks.
As per the latest load shedding schedule, industrial areas will face power cuts only during evenings or nights. Domestic consumers will however have to go without power once in the morning and again in the evening or night.
“The increased power cuts are due to reduced power generation as a result of rivers drying up. Unlike last winter, we have managed to plug the technical problems and hopefully load-shedding won’t reach 16 hours daily,” said a senior NEA official over phone.
The power cuts have also affected the country’s tourism sector as hotels and restaurants are forced to buy fuel to feed generators. But it has come as a boom for manufacturers and distributors of inverters and batteries.
“We have been getting lot of queries from people who want to buy inverters. Going by the surge in demand, it seems we will have good business this year as well,” said Govind Upadhyay, employee at an electrical appliances outlet in Kathmandu’s Putalisadak area.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Madav Kumar Nepal and Energy Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat are on a China visit these days and financial and technical assistance from the northern neighbor to boost the country’s power sector is one of the main issues in the agenda.
