Port Blair, May 08: The Chief Secretary, A&N Administration, Shri Keshav Chandra, IAS had a detailed meeting today with the Senior Officers and Technical Team of Electricity Department to review the progress of remedial measures underway to resolve the problems being faced by public due to frequent interruption in power supply and to find out a permanent solution.
The reason for interruption/outages as analysed was mainly due to under frequency/overload as there is substantial gap between demand and supply as a result of prolonged hot season (unlike previous years) coupled with T&D system faults.
While the Administration is in the advance stages of hiring additional 15 MW DG capacity to overcome crisis situation, the Chief Secretary directed the Electricity Department to initiate the following remedial actions:-
• Immediately hire a technically competent maintenance agency for carrying out regular maintenance of Transmission & Distribution System including line clearance, with suitable penalty provision to ensure effective management of line clearance.
• Immediately float tenders for replacement of bare conductor with covered conductors, which will resolve most of the issues.
• Development of software to check and monitor pilferage of diesel and forming an Enforcement Team.
• Presently, relay coordination is being carried out Departmentally, which substantially reduces the line faults and consequent system failures. The Electricity Department was directed to hire external expert agency as advised by CEA to further improve relay coordination, which may bring much better results.
• The hearing of JERC before entering into Power Purchase Agreement for 15 MW DG is fixed on 16.5.2023. Addition of 15 MW is likely to resolve most of the issues.
• As a long-term solution and as redundant to avoid future crisis situation, it was also decided to add 10-15 MW Government owned power plant, a press release from Electricity Department said.
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