BENGALURU: As part of Congress’ pre-poll guarantee, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah recently announced that households consuming less than 200 units of electricity per month will be given free power, which is calculated based on the average of consumption over the last one year and 10 per cent extra.
The new scheme will come into effect from August 1 and the programme will cost the state exchequer Rs 25,000 crore. The state has 1.61 crore households and around 2.14 crore power meters in the domestic segment. With the free power guarantee, a large portion of all domestic consumption and all of the agriculture sector will no longer pay any money to electricity supply companies.
SM Jaamdar, former additional chief secretary who also served as MD of KPTCL, said, “To create a conducive environment for all the stakeholders -- energy generators, transmitters and distributors, whether they are private or government -- by providing robust infrastructure, it is imperative for the government to develop a policy to give the power sector, which is technology based, much needed fillip. This opens up the possibility of making public private participation inclusive.”
As per a report released by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in February 2023, even when the whole country was battling a severe power crisis in 2022, due to coal shortage, Karnataka was largely unaffected as its dependency on thermal power is less than 40 per cent.
The Centre, to connect the power grids of all states with the National Power Grid, has approved the Inter-State Transmission System (ISTS) - Green Energy Corridor Phase 2. The total estimated cost of this project is Rs 12,000 crore, of which the Centre will fund 33 percent. The Centre aims to make the country’s power supply system world-class to eradicate the problem of load shedding and power shortage.
One of the projects includes the 400 KV Udupi-Kasaragod Transmission Line (UKTL) tosupply electricity to Kasaragod in Kerala through Udupi and Dakshina Kannada. UKTL is a Tariff Based Competitive Bidding Project (TBCB) for the Centre’s ISTS project to provide a solution that will add to Karnataka’s earnings from power surplus and address electricity shortage problems in north Kerala.
The interesting part is that the construction of requisite transmission towers in Kerala has been completed, but the work in Karnataka is yet to begin. Though adequate efforts have been made to kickstart the project, requisite surveys are yet to be done. Some experts believe that the lack of support in Karnataka could be due to inadequate understanding about the benefits of the project which has the potential to bring in revenues to the state to the tune of Rs 2,500 crore with a target of Rs 6,500 crore.
The demand for reliable power is only going to increase and the local geography will benefit from the availability of a robust power corridor to match the incremental demand. The availability of transmission infrastructure will induce power generation companies to set up generation plants in the vicinity of transmission infrastructure.
Dakshin Kannada region is constantly facing challenges of low voltage which could be resolved once the UKTL transmission line is completed which will bring additional capacity for the region as well as for Kerala. Karnataka needs to make more efforts and prioritise the construction of high-power transmission lines. If that happens, more revenue will come to the state’s coffers, study reports say.