CHENNAI: After a series of inspections by the newly-constituted monitoring teams over the past week, the city’s weeks-long struggle with recurring power outage has been pinned down to two main causes - exposed underground cables damaged during civic works and transformers buckling under surging demand.
The outage is the culmination of issues that have been building up for years and the fixes may not all be immediate, TNPDCL officials acknowledge.
The outage problem persisted at key locations including Mount Road, Velachery, Perambur and newly added areas such as Sholinganallur, Medavakkam and Kannagi Nagar.
Patching works are being carried wherever damaged cables are found, the officials said. A large part of the damage is being caused by road-cutting works carried out by Greater Chennai Corporation and the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board, TNPDCL officials said.
In addition, the officials said residents in several areas have resisted allowing digging or breaking of concrete surfaces for cable relaying, slowing response time. In one recent instance in Adyar, work could begin only after prolonged discussions and assurances that the damaged surface would be restored.
Manpower is another constraint. Contract workers for cable work are entitled to `700 a day under Public Works Department guidelines, a rate which officials say few are willing to accept.
Unless the state government revises the wage structure, recruitment of adequate field staff is a struggle, they said. Chennai has 16,582 km of underground cable network alongside 18,092 km of overhead lines in which the latter needs gradual conversion to underground.
A German development bank had come forward to offer financing at 3% interest for the project and a detailed project report was submitted to the previous DMK government. TNPDCL said it is now revising the proposal for submission to the new TVK government.
The surge in demand has compounded the strain on ageing infrastructure. Chennai’s peak demand crossed 5,014 MW earlier this week, nearly 14-19% higher than the 4,200-4,400 MW recorded around the same time last year, with June temperatures running above normal from the start of the month. The network in its present shape is not built to absorb the demand, the officials said.