CEA to unveil guidelines for crisis & disaster management

Central Electricity Authority will soon unveil detailed guidelines on disaster management at power plants, transmission lines and distribution networks as well as for creating awareness among public and utilities about overall safety.
"Recently we have convened several meetings and consulted various stakeholders. We are in the process of finalising separate guidelines for hydro, thermal, transmission and distribution network. I hope that the guidelines will be available soon," CEA Chairman Major Singh said addressing a 'National Workshop on Electrical Safety' here.
"Apart from general document for crisis and disaster management in power sector, we felt the need that there should be some guidelines for exclusively covering various areas like thermal (plants), hydro (plants), power transmission and distribution network," he said.

Singh was referring to disaster and crisis like fire and flood at power plants, transmission line and distribution networks.
Stressing the country's has enough power generation capacity, he said: "The problem comes in the inter state development of transmission system and augmentation of sub-transmission distribution network by some of the states."
Elaborating further, he said, "Our generation capacity is much more than our requirement at present. It was about 298 GW as on March this year. We have enough capacity to meet our requirements. There is no shortage actually.

"The thermal plants are running at an all India average of 62 per cent of plant load factor (proportion of capacity utilisation). So we have enough capacity to meet the demand."

Singh was of the view that the most of the accidents take place in distribution sector while the generation and transmission sector report very few such incidents.
He was of the view that as far as electrical safety is concerned, prime focus is required on distribution sector apart from industry producing appliances.