Recently there is a power cut every monday in our company.On enquiring, the admin told us the electricity board had issued a directive that power supply will be stopped to all IT cos in the OMR stretch and requested the IT cos to swap a holiday with monday. Most of us were really upset as we always thought Tamilnadu had enough power compared to neighbouring states.One of my colleague told that the Kalpakkam reactor is functioning at half it's capacity leading to the current crisis.I thought that it could be a demand-supply problem as lot of cos started operations in chennai in recent times.
Today i had a chance to chat about this topic with couple of engineers in the electrcity board.This is what they said - "The problem is demand exceeds supply as no power plant was commissioned after 1995.As we know the economy boomed only in the late 90s and many cos started operations in chennai, leading to the current shortage.The power sector has been badly ignored the last 10 years leading to no new power plant being commissioned in the state.The reason for the stagnation was that the govt tried a private-public model wherein the private players would generate power & supply it to the board.But unfortunately this did not go very well due to economic constraints."
So what does the future hold, this is what they had to say : "The only way out now is to declare monday as an holiday and work on another day, thereby making sure the peek demand is distributed. Hopefully the problem will be solved in 2 years as the govt has taken a series of measures to pump in power thru' new plants." Let us hope the state as well as india become energy-sufficient soon and at the same time it will be better if the process is environment-friendly as well:-)
Trivia:
Out of the available power plants NLC(Neyveli), Kalpakkam nuclear plant are central govt owned and the rest like mettur hydro, Ennore thermal are state owned.The central owned plants will contribute to what is called as an southern grid, which is shared by all southern states.The state owned, obviously, meets the demand of the local state.
