With the temperature touching 39 degrees Celsius coupled with high humidity levels, the demand for power in the Capital touched a new high of 5,925 MW on Tuesday. But so did the extent of power cuts across the city. Several parts of the city experienced outages of about 4 to 5 hours.
Tuesday’s consumption broke the previous record for power consumption this season registered on July 11 when it had gone up to 5,810 MW. On Monday the city had consumed 5,706 MW.
Due to the rising heat and humidity the demand for power has been increasing substantially for the past one week and is expected to go up to 6,100 MW this summer. On June 6 last year, the demand had peaked at 5,653 MW.
“The highest-ever demand for power in Delhi was recorded at 5,925 MW at 3-20 p.m. which is a new record,” a Power Department official said.
Asked about the reasons for outages despite Delhi having sufficient power, the Department officials blamed the two BSES discoms -- BSES Yamuna and BSES Rajdhani -- which together distribute power to about 70 per cent of the city.
“Power cuts are happening mainly in the BSES areas because of their weak distribution network. The distribution lines trip when the demand for electricity goes up, because they have not been strengthened to take increased loads,” said an official.
“The Lieutenant-Governor-run Delhi government has been asking the BSES discoms to improve their distribution network. But the situation has not improved,” the official said. Last year the then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit had even threatened to take strict action against BSES if the distribution network did not improve.
The trend of power cuts continued to test the patience of the residents of the Capital. Zeenat Anwar, a housewife from Uttam Nagar is used to power cuts. And when on Tuesday her area faced long outages, she said it did not “surprise” her.
“The situation of power is, one thing I believe, never going to improve. Electricity went off at 11 a.m. and came around 3:30 p.m. It does affects our daily lives and especially so during Ramadan, the month of fasting when power outages only make the matters worse,” she said.
“These days, students are tested on a continuous evaluation basis and have to appear for exams every week. Due to incessant power outages they find it extremely difficult to study after dark. The heat and humidity make the matter worse,” she added.
Yusuf Zaman, who runs an establishment at Lajpat Nagar, said his office faces power cuts of 3-4 hours everyday and Tuesday was no different.
“The cables were not able to take load of the power provided, so today the cables had to be changed. As it meant an absence of power for eight hours, I had to give off to my staff of eight today. It is such a loss of work and money for me,” he said.
Several areas of East and West Delhi and some parts of South Delhi faced outages as the Agra-Gwalior line of the Delhi Transco Limited (DTL) got overloaded resulting in its tripping. The affected areas included Geeta Colony, Laxmi Nagar, Uttam Nagar and Paschim Vihar among others.
