TIRUPATI: There will be no hike in power tariff on unit rates for either domestic or commercial consumers, assured Justice G Bhavani Prasad, Chairman of APERC, here on Friday. The APERC conducted a public hearing at APSPDCL headquarters for ‘Aggregate Revenue Requirements and Tariff Proposals for Retail Supply Business’ for the financial year 2018-19.
Speaking on the occasion, he said that for the SC and ST consumers up to 50 units are free of cost. “Now with the efforts of APERC, who requested the CM to increase it up to 75 units, but, he called for hiking up to 100 units for every SC/ST family per month, which is impossible immediately, because increase up to 75 units has taken decades, but we will try for the best,” he explained.
He said that they have been successful in reducing APSPDCL expenses and at the same time cutting down purchasing expenses up to 77 per cent from 85 to 90 per cent. APSPDCL CMD MM Nayak also clarified that there was no proposal for increasing power tariff. He also stated that in the region, they were able to supply uninterrupted power and reduced the distribution loss from 12.98 in 2010 to 8.24 per cent at present.“The IRDA meters are the solution to cut loss drastically,” the CMD said and added that the State government was going to spend a total of `3,403 crore as subsidy to farmers in the State.