NEW DELHI: The Power Ministry on Tuesday took yet another step to bring benefit of low cost of power to the consumers and transparency in procurement of power through competitive bidding process that is aimed at overall reduction of cost to the power distribution companies.
Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (Independent charge) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy launched “DEEP (Discovery of Efficient Electricity Price) e-Bidding & e-Reverse Auction portal” for procurement of short term power by DISCOMs.
Speaking on the occasion, the minister said that the web portal will ensure seamless flow of power from seller to buyer. “It will be a very strong weapon to curb illegal transactions and will help in price reduction through competition,” said Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (Independent charge) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy. Currently out of total generation of around 91671.33MUs, above 10% (9215.24MUs) is transacted through short term through bilateral and through power exchanges etc.
To give impetus to the use of the web portal and to take it to next level, the Minister added that all states should put their power purchase data on the portal within one month. To bring competition amongst the states Goyal announced that first five states to put data within one week will be rewarded.
The web portal is a common e-bidding platform with e-Reverse Auction facility. The advantages include dissemination of information on nationwide power procurement to a wider network including the stakeholders in power sector.
It is expected to bring uniformity in the process of power procurement and enabling Distribution Licensees to procure power in a short time. Bidders have the option to bid multiple bids from separate logins either from same or different sources.