CHENNAI: Power minister V Senthil Balaji on Wednesday blamed a sudden drop in power supply from the central grid for the unscheduled outage in many parts of the State. The minister tweeted that about 750 megawatt (MW) of power from the central grid to southern states dropped abruptly on Wednesday night.
“Problems were rectified immediately in urban areas and steps would be taken over the next 15 minutes in rural areas,” he said in his tweet at 11.27pm on Wednesday. The minister’s statement came amid complaints of unscheduled power cuts for nearly two to three hours from 8pm on Wednesday in several districts including Cuddalore, Coimbatore, Karur, Virudhunagar and Dindigul.
A senior official told TNIE that the State’s average power demand is nearly 15,500MW, and TN gets around 5,000MW from the central grid. “As we lost 750MW suddenly, we could not manage it. The power grid officials are the only people who could give the reason for the sudden drop. The issue might have occurred because of overload problems or errors by other state distribution companies,” the official said.
‘Power supply stopped uniformly’
Talking about coal, the official said there was no coal shortage as of now in Tamil Nadu even though some States including Delhi have been facing shortage. Tangedco has five coal-based thermal plants, two each in North Chennai and Mettur and one in Thoothukudi, with a combined capacity of 4,320MW.
Power generation has been stopped in Thoothukudi units due to technical issues. Tangedco has planned to procure 4.8 lakh tonnes of coal from private players, and tenders have been floated. R Ganesh, a resident of Sampatharmapuram in Theni, said many areas in the district faced power interruption from 8pm to 10.30pm.
Another resident, M Syamala of Sanarpatti in Dindigul district, said being a working woman she was not able to do any household chores when she came back from office. “I was forced to buy dinner for my family. My family members did not sleep till 12pm without a fan,” she said. R Vinothan, Superintendent Engineer, Dindigul, said they stopped power supply for one hour in all areas uniformly starting from 6.30pm to maintain power demand and supply as per the instructions of higher officials.
The farmers in Mayiladuthurai district who have started kuruvai paddy cultivation in late April or early May use groundwater for irrigation and do not wait for the government to release Cauvery water. They cultivate early so that they can start samba or thaladi paddy cultivation by September or October. “We were once getting 20 hours of power supply a day 20 years ago.
Now we get it only for 12 hours. It should not be reduced. We need at least 12 hours of power at specified schedules to run our motors,” said R Rajasekar, a farmer from Therazhundur near Mayiladuthurai.
(With inputs from Jeyalakshmi Ramanujam @ Madurai and Antony Fernando @ Mayiladuthurai)