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Marking the beginning of a new supply-demand paradigm after the bifurcation, Andhra Pradesh state power utilities have decided to push the demand in the state as supply is expected to far outstrip consumption owing to a substantial capacity addition expected this year.
Andhra Pradesh is the only state in the entire south India that has almost negligible levels of power shortage during the ongoing summer, even though it is the only state in the region credited with implementing 24/7 supply across the consumer categories since October last year.
“We are planning for a 20 per cent growth in the overall demand in the current year and it would be mostly driven by industrial consumption,” Ajay Jain, secretary, energy and infrastructure & investment, said on Monday while unveiling the measures to ramp up transmission capacities in line with the targeted demand.
Jain said 25-27 per cent growth in demand was aimed from the industrial sector in addition to 10-12 per cent growth in consumption from households. To push the domestic demand, the government is planning to provide power supply to 500,000 households that do not have electricity connections by March 2016, according to him.
While issuing the tariff order for 2015-16 recently, the Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission (Aperc) had reworked the energy requirement for the year allowing a 16 per cent growth at 54,224 million units as against 57,644 million units proposed by the state discoms.
“We will approach the regulator for a mid course correction for taking the additional demand into consideration,”Jain said in response to a question as to what made them to go for a higher demand push in the state. He said there was ample scope for higher growth in power demand as the economy was expected to grow at 12 per cent.
Leaving the merchant power plants aside, the state is slated to get 4,000 Mw of additional capacity that has to be procured and supplied by the power utilities under the power purchase agreements. These include a 1,050-Mw Hinduja power project and a 1,600-Mw Krishnapatnam power project owned by AP Genco. While these two are coal-fired power plants, the government is expecting 1,000-Mw wind power and 350-Mw solar power to go on stream in the private sector this year.
Citing these capacity additions, APTransco chairman and managing director K Vijayanand said it made sense to push the demand as there would be ample power available in the state.
The decision to push the power demand in AP also comes against the backdrop of Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao hardening his stand on power sharing. After AP declined to give the prescribed share in generation from Hinduja and Krishnapatnam projects, the chief minister of power-starved Telangana recently said they would prefer suffering in the short-term than taking power from AP hereafter.
It may be recalled that under the AP Reorganisation Act, Telangana and AP were mandated to share power in 54-46 ratio respectively from their generating stations that have PPAs with the government prior to bifurcation. AP also disputes these allocation percentages.
However, a final decision on the sharing arrangement os expected to be announced by the central government-appointed committee by the end of this month.
The power supply data of all the southern states on April 5, 2015, shows AP has the least supply shortage of 0.10 million units while there was a shortfall of 3.33 million units in Telangana, 9.12 million units in Karnataka and 6.14 million units in Tamil Nadu.
