Sail Worried Over Change In Power Supply System

Steel Authority of India (SAIL) chairman Arvind Pandey expressed his anguish over the change in power-supply regime in the eastern region. He has also written to Union ministries of steel and power about the losses suffered by SAIL due to a change from low frequency regime to high frequency regime.

Pandey complained that the change in power supply regime is violative of the conditions of supply laid down in the Indian Electricity Rules. The supply agencies cannot be penalised as SAIL suffered huge losses owing to plant equipment damage, loss in production and inflated energy bills.

Why have a set of rules which the government does not know how to enforce and the violators cannot be taken to task, he asked. Various power supply agencies are just evading responsibility for the state of the affairs, he has pointed out.

 

The issue was raised during the sitting of the committee of enquiry set up by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) to investigate the cause of the continuous high frequency problem in the eastern region. The committee had been set up in early April after the system frequency rose to a record high of 52.92 cycles a second taking the grid very close to a failure.

The committee comprises three senior CEA officials: G S Rajamani (chairman of the committee), G K Pharlia and S Sethvandantham. Of the three, only Pharlia came to Calcutta for the two-day sitting of the committee. The consumers included representatives from SAIL, Tisco and the Railways. The consumers pointed out that the earlier problem of low frequency was caused by the consumers failure to shed load according to the supply shortfall. But, the high frequency problem reflected apparent indisciplne of the power generators who are refusing back down their generation matching the level of demand.

High or low frequency operation, it was pointed out, caused tripping of the drives in the plants often resulting in burning out of motors. The control cards too fail. A continuous high frequency operation also causes metering problems. It leads to faster meter reading and shows a higher energy consumption and so a fatter energy bill. The maximum demand component in the two-part tariff shows an artificially high demand and again the bill is higher.

The equipment get damaged. The steel plants are also power generators with SAIL alone having a capacity of 662 mw. The high frequency regime has already damaged quite a few generator turbine blades. Higher generator speed also causes higher fuel consumption. The consumers told the committee on Tuesday and Wednesday that the high frequency regime can be controlled only if there are provisions of incentive and penalty in the daily operation. In fact, the eastern region generating agencies had earlier agreed such a clause, but, later backed out.

The committee which was asked to submit report within 30 days conducted its first sitting after the expiry of the deadline.