Punjab sells ‘surplus’ power amid reports of outages across state

“We have enough coal to sustain us for 47 days. Our Talwandi Sabo thermal plant has been running on half its capacity. We ran our Ropar Thermal Plant to its capacity only on Monday. We had prepared for peak paddy transplantation season. But the government divided the state into zones for transplantation. We now have surplus power and are selling it to other states,” said a power corporation official.
He added that they were prepared for a peak demand of 14,000 MW at present.

Interestingly though, even though the state was selling power to other states, parts of Punjab have reported power cuts and subsequent protests by locals in the last few days.

The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (non-political), a breakaway group of the SKM, has been protesting outside the PSPCL headquarters in Patiala to seek electricity connections for farmers, an end to commercial fee on electricity connections taken for ancillary businesses and a permanent solution to the stray cattle menace, among others things.

Records also showed that three days ago, the Nayagaon and Kansal areas near Chandigarh saw a power cut that lasted for close to 11 hours.

Contacted, chairman of PSPCL, Baldev Singh Sran, however, denied that there were any power cuts in the state. “There are no scheduled cuts. Whatever is the problem, it has been caused by the storm and rain. It sometimes takes a long time carry out repair work. Still we have been carrying out repair work at a better pace than our neighbour Haryana.”

He added that in some cases, local residents were also to be blamed for using high power consuming appliances without an appropriate increase in their power loads. “This was causing the transformers to develop a snag. Whenever a snag is reported, we go and repair it,” he said.