Delhi's power demand rises to 6,188 MW

Within a day of breaking previous records, Delhi's power demand today rose further and hit an all-time peak of 6,188 MW while electricity supply was crippled in large areas of South Delhi adding to the woes of people battling sweltering heat.
In view of the situation, Power Minister Satyender Jain held a meeting involving discoms BSES and Tata Power and directed them to immediately deploy additional teams to minimize the complaints of electricity consumers to deal with consumers complaints.
Even Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal was not spared of the ordeal as the National Media Centre saw a black out while he was addressing the media about the Centre's initiatives to boost electricity supply in the country.

The State Load Despatch Centre recorded the maximum power load of 6,188 MW at 3.18 PM, as against yesterday's 6,044 MW. Demand has increased by over 8 per cent in just 48 hours, officials said.
Jain directed the Power department to seek three hourly status and daily reports from the discoms about consumer complaints and their redressal. According to the discoms, Delhi's power load in the third week of May in 2015 and 2014 were 5027 MW and 4512 MW respectively.
After power demand breached the 6,000 MW mark yesterday, authorities had urged residents to stop using non-important power guzzling appliances during peak hours.

South Delhi areas that faced outages include South Extension, Defence Colony, Nizamudin, Vasant Vihar, East of Kailash and Jangpura due to issues with 400 KV Maharani Bagh and 220 KV Lodhi Road Circle transformers.

A resident of Malviya Nagar complained that "the locality
has been facing power cuts for the last three days. Every night around 12.30 pm, power goes and it comes at least three hours later."
The discoms attributed the faults to extreme heat and round the clock power demand round which they said are not giving sufficient time to the power networks to cool down.
Jain inquired about the complaint handling mechanism of discoms and asked their representatives why a large number of consumers are facing difficulty in registering their complaints.

"It was informed that on Thursday 4,775, 5,219 and 1,383 complaints were registered at the call centers of BYPL, BRPL and TPDDL respectively," the government said in a statement.
BSES urged people residing in areas that come under it to register their complaints through the company's mobile App, which it said can be downloaded from BSES' website or Google Play.
Jain directed the discoms to enhance the existing staff capacity in its call centres and add telephone lines.
BSES and TPDDL informed the government that there are no system constraints at the transmission and sub-transmission level, however, some local faults have been reported at the distribution level in some areas due to overloading of distribution transformers among others.