CHENNAI: Facing political heat over sporadic power cuts across the State over the past few days, Electricity Minister V Senthil Balaji on Friday told the Tamil Nadu Assembly that all arrangements have been made to import 4.80 lakh tonnes of coal required for the months of April and May, and there won’t be power cuts for industries and domestic consumers despite shortage of coal supply from the Union government.
“Four companies took part in tenders for imported coal. The tenders have been finalised at $137 per tonne of coal. Including 5% GST, the price would be $143 per tonne,” the minister said in his reply to members of the AIADMK, the Congress and the PMK.
“Tamil Nadu needs 72,000 tonnes of coal per day. The Union government, which provided 48,000 tonnes to 50,000 tonnes of coal per day, had reduced it to 30,317 tonnes on April 18. The next day, the State received 37,785 tonnes of coal. On April 20, the supply stood at 20,257 tonnes and on April 21, it went up slightly to 46,000 tonnes,” the minister said.
“During the previous regime, State’s own power generation capacity was not increased even by 5% per year. Had that been done, Tamil Nadu would not have faced power shortage now,” Balaji said. The minister said the unscheduled outage in certain parts of the State for the past two days was due to sudden drop in power supply (296MW) from the central grid and steps were taken expeditiously to address the issue. Though Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh have announced power cuts due to shortage of coal, Tamil Nadu has been ensuring uninterrupted power supply, he said.
“Till this moment, the 296MW shortage in supply from the central grid has not been rectified. Power disruption was experienced only in 41 places and it was quickly set right,” the minister said, adding that similar power cuts had taken place 68 times during the previous AIADMK regime between 2016 and 2021. But after the DMK government assumed office, such power disruption was felt only once, that too because of the short supply from the central grid, he said.
The average per day consumption of power in Tamil Nadu which stood at 317 million units went up to 347 million units on April 20 and 363 million units on April 21. As a precautionary step to meet the increasing demand during April and May, arrangements have been made to purchase 3,000MW of power at a lower cost.
Leader of Opposition Edappadi K Palaniswami, who said the power cuts were because of the wrong decisions taken by the DMK government, expressed dissatisfaction over the minister’s reply and walked out of the House along with AIADMK MLAs.