Shillong, April 19: The Managing Director of the Meghalaya Energy Corporation Limited (MeECL) Sanjay Goyal on Wednesday hoped that the power scenario will improve shortly.
The state is witnessing eight-nine hours of loadshedding.
“Let me assure you that this situation is going to improve in the days to come,” Goyal told reporters.
He was responding to a question on the steps taken to lift the load shedding.
“We are expecting some more power from other sources but that might not come very soon. Maybe in the days to come and with some rainfall which we are expecting as per information, we will get power from Leshka and we will try to reduce the hours of load shedding,” he said.
Goyal said there is a gap between the availability of power and the demand which is there in the state.
“The demand is roughly touching around 250 MW and the availability is roughly around 170 MW which is from our own generation as well as our entitlements from the central generating units – from the NEEPCO, NTPC and from Agartala based power plant,” he added.
“To some extent, we are trying to fulfil the demand from the open market but the purchase of the power is quite costly during the certain period of the day so we are going for the load shedding,” he said.
“We are even going up to Rs 8 for purchase of power whereas the average cost of billing which the regulator is allowing us is roughly Rs 4.5. Therefore, the corporation is taking that hit of around Rs 3 per unit during the peak time”, he said.
“We are trying to see that during the evening time we are not going for load shedding and that is the time the power available in the market is at the very high cost rate but we are doing the operation just to ensure the supply of power,” he said.
Goyal said the shortage of water has impacted the generating units of the Myntdu Leshka Hydro Electric Project as it is off-production for the last 5-6 days.
Moreover, the water level of Umiam is also decreasing very fast because we are excessively using this water to compensate the loss of power which is not available through Myntdu.
Asked whether there is a failure in managing the power scenario, Goyal said, “It’s not about the failure I think that is too simplistic a statement. See we have to understand one thing, we have only one project in Meghalaya which is dependent on the pondage which is the Umiam. We have a huge reservoir which takes the water all through the year and it is during this lean period we use this water right from the month of November onwards till the month of April or May till the time we get rainfall during the monsoons.”
