DERC wants industries to shift activities to off peak hours

Taking forward the reform initiative, Delhi's power regulator DERC has now decided to encourage industrial establishments to shift their activities to off peak hours, wooing them with financial incentives, as part of its efforts to stabilise electricity availability.
The Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission has decided to extend the Time of Day Metering scheme, a concept borrowed from European countries, to all commercial consumers having sanctioned load of 25 kilo watt so as to discourage them from consuming more power during peak hours.
Time of Day metering (TOD), also known as Time of Usage (TOU) or Seasonal Time of Day (SToD), metering involves dividing the day, month and year into tariff slots and with higher rates at peak load periods and low tariff rates at off-peak load periods.

DERC Chairman P D Sudhakar said the Commission wants the commercial consumers to shift to ToD so that consumption of power during peak hours could be limited.
"We want more commercial consumers to shift their activities to off peak hours and that is why we have brought down the sanctioned load to 25 kilo watt from existing 50 KV to avail the benefits of ToD," Sudhakar told PTI.
The DERC has kept off peak hours from 3 AM to 9 AM, while the peak hours are from 1-5 PM and 9 PM to 12 AM.

Experts said bringing down the load to 25 KV will help a large number of commercial consumers to migrate to ToD, thereby aiding the private power distribution companies to address the problem of load shedding.

Asked whether DERC was considering extending ToD to domestic consumers, Sudhakar said it was possible but added "huge investment" would be required to upgrade the existing power transmission infrastructure.
Experts say the DERC's decision on ToD will also help the discoms financially as often they have to procure additional power from the market at very high rates to meet the peak hour demand.
As per its reform initiatives, DERC recently came out with rules and regulations for installation of rooftop solar panels to encourage consumers.
Officials said DERC wants to put in place an effective demand response mechanism through which consumers will be able to save money on power consumption, while discoms will be able to cut down power purchase cost.

As per the discoms, the cost of buying power has risen over the years primarily on account of an increase in the input cost of raw material like coal and gas.
According to official figures, around 80-90 per cent of total revenue of discoms goes into purchasing power from central and state government-owned entities through long-term power purchase agreement at rates determined by the central and state regulators.