Industry to be hit by power cuts

Industry is likely to face the brunt of growing demand-supply gap of power in Maharashtra as the state government has proposed to increase the number of days of power cuts in industrial areas from one day to two days.

This is likely to affect the nearly Rs 43,000 crore investment in industrial sector expected to come to Maharashtra.

The gap between demand and supply during the morning peak hour was recorded at 5,700 MW on Tuesday and similarly during the evening peak hours, it has reached 4,600 MW. A good monsoon and booming economy is resulting in greater demand from agriculture and industry sector. The demand for power has increased by at least 1,000 MW by each sector, compared to last year.

This is forcing the state-owned power distributor MSEDCL to go for unplanned power cuts in villages and power cut there has increased from 12 hours to18 hours.

This is resulting in growing incidents of attacks on MSEDCL's offices, staff and mass protests. One such protest in Umred in Nagpur district turned violent, and the police had to open fire and two were killed. The state government is fearing protests in the forthcoming zilla parishad and panchayat samiti polls.

This has resulted in prolonged load shedding hours in by MSEDCL. Now there will be 4 hours of load shedding instead of three hours in all municipal corporation areas except Mumbai, eight hours in other areas instead of the earlier six hours and load shedding for agriculture sector will go up from 12 hours to 14 hours.

Addressing a press meet, Maharashtra Energy Minister Dileep Walse-Patil said, "We are announcing these cuts as temporary measures to avoid unplanned power cuts. To increase load shedding hours, we need permission from the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC)and we have moved the application before the MERC seeking permission for increase the load shedding hours.

As per the MERC's request we have given 10 options to study in which load shedding can be increased, Walse-Patil added. However, Patil refused to divulge the details of those options.

It was reliably learnt, one option from among the 10 options is to increase the staggering off in the industrial areas from one day to two days. Presently, in various industrial estates, across the state, no electricity is supplied for one day.

Maharashtra government had signed a number of high profile MoUs in last year and half which will bring investment of nearly 43,000 crore and it is feared that, if number of days of no electricity supply increase then it will affect the moral of investors coming to state and they may explore other options.

Some of the big ticket investment which are coming to state include Volkswagen's Rs 2,000 crore car manufacturing facility, General Motors 1350 crore car manufacturing unit, Rs 2,000 crore Bajaj's capacity expansion program and four wheel commercial vehicle unit, Rs 500 crore Boeing's Maintenance Repairs and Ovherhaul (MRO) facility, Mahindra's Rs 1250 crore expansion program.

The industry may be perturbed as it will hit theancillary units which do not have capti8ve units, said sources from the industries department.

However, Walse-Patil expressed confidence, "this extraordinary situation will not remain for too long as agriculture season will come to an end by the end of March, in these two months state government's power utility Mahgenco's 500 MW plants will get synchronised.

Presently, the state gets only around 330 MW from Dabhol as one unit will be out by first week of April as it will be repaired and synchronised again".

Besides this, the state is taking steps to procure power from all available sources, he added.