Amidst the loadshedding woes, Managing Director of MeECL Sanjay Goyal on Wednesday said that the situation as far as load shedding is concerned in the state will improve shortly.
Stating that the demand roughly is touching roughly around 250 Megawatts and the available power is around 170 Mega watts, Goyal said the gap between power demand and supply still exists.
“The demand roughly is touching roughly around 250 Megawatts and the available power is around 170 Mega watts, which is from our home generation as well as the entitlement from the central generating units from the NEEPCO, OTPC, and the Agartala based power plant,” Goyal said.
The Managing Director of MeECL further said, “ The gap to certain extend we are trying to fulfill from the open market operations, which we talk about the purchase of power, some of it is since we are not able to go top that extend of purchase of power because it is costly during the certain period of the day, we are going for the load shedding.”
As far as the Myntdu Leshka hydel power project is concerned, two units (of 42MW) are also shut down as the project had a bitter impact following a dry spell. The non availability of water has added to the woes.
The official also said, the water level of Umiam is also depleting very fast because of excess usage of this water to compensate for the loss of power which is not available through the Myntdu Leshka hydel power project.
He also informed that the duration of load shedding in Shillong is slightly short in comparison to other parts of the state owing to the fact that Shillong is the capital and Bill collection here is quite good. The question remains how long will this power cut continue?
He also informed about the purchase of power at the high rate to meet this gap between the demand and the supply.
With the Garo Hills region facing severe power cuts for not less than 10 hours of loadshedding and sometimes even more, people in the western part of Meghalaya continues to face this problem amidst heatwave. Even the Khasi Jaintia Hills too are facing load shedding for not less than 8 to 9 hours.
“Roughly I can say as of now we are going for around 8-9 hours of power cut, which we are trying to reduce in the days to come and we will see if we can procure some cheaper power from the open market that also exercise we will do,” Goyal said.
About the extension of the load shedding timing in Garo Hills, the Managing Director of MeECL said, “Only yesterday there was short 24 hours of instability in the grid, where we had to resort to one more extra hour of loadshedding specially in the Garo Hills. This is for one day, today we have sat in and we have tried to reworkout.”
“We will see as I have mentioned these operations are slightly complex in nature and it has a lot of things to do with the other North Eastern regions the stability of the grid and other kinds of operations and other states get impacted not only Meghalaya when any stays over draws power beyond entitlement,” he added.