Power holiday, cuts irk entrepreneurs in AP; lack of planning, says Oppn

Visakhapatnam: The power crisis in Andhra Pradesh leading to imposition of loadshedding to domestic sector and power holiday for industries have led to severe resentment among the entrepreneurs and general public as the Opposition parties have blamed the State Government for its failure to initiate measures in advance to meet increasing demand during summer.

For the first time after the YSRCP formed the government, such a crisis has arisen. "Power holidays are declared for the first time after 2011-12. This will force us to shutdown our operations at a time when we are bouncing back to normalcy after suffering huge losses due to the pandemic," a top executive of an agrofood processing unit, told Bizz Buzz on Sunday.

The situation is very bad."We are given a weekly power holiday in addition to no power supply on Sundays. For all practical purposes there is power holiday on two full days and power supply restricted to only 6 am to 6 pm. This deals a big blow to many of MSME units," Visakha Autonagar Small-Scale Industrialists' Welfare Association president A.K. Balaji said and hoped that the government will tide over the crisis soon.

The Opposition parties, who got political ammunition to hit back at the YSRCP Government, have hit the streets against power cuts/holiday. TDP national general secretary Nara Lokesh said the government lacks any planning to tackle such situations, which are avoidable. CITU State president Ch. Narsinga Rao said there is a conspiracy to install smart meters for all agriculture pump sets after failing to supply nine hours of uninterrupted supply to them during the day.

The tariff by independent power providers has gone up in the aftermath of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and situation arising out of it in Asia and Europe and the coal short-supply within India during the past few months leading to an increase in per tonne cost of coal from Rs.8,000 to Rs.40,000 has aggravated the crisis.

According to grid officials, there is a significant increase in energy demand in all sectors of the State which led to shortage of around 50 MU per day. The total energy demand in all sectors in 2018-19 was 63,605 MU which shot up to 68,905 MU in 2021-22 by 8.3 percent. There is an increase of 32 percent, 6 percent and 16 percent in domestic, industrial and agricultural categories respectively.

Government officials said the energy demand in the domestic sector was 14,681 MU (2018-19) which increased to 19,355 MU (2021-22). The industrial demand increased from 17,781 MU to 18,844 MU for the same period. The energy demand for agriculture in 2018-19 was 10,832 MU for 17.3 lakh agricultural consumers that has increased to 12,720 MU in 2021-22 with 18.5 lakh agricultural consumers as of now.

Officials said that the energy demand is forecasted to be 6,720 MU in April-2022 which was 5,721 MU in April-2019. Similarly, the peak demand was 8,984 MW in March-2019 which is expected to escalate to 13,000 MW for FY 22-23. The energy demand met on April 9 was 211.27 MU with peak demand of 10,909 MW. The reason for high demand is primarily due to resumption of economic activities across various sectors like industrial, commercial, agriculture and domestic in the State with ease in COVID pandemic conditions" a senior official said.

During a review meeting, Energy Secretary B Sreedhar said on Sunday that the State Government and power utilities are making all-out efforts to bring the power situation to normalcy and sought cooperation from all the

consumers.

He said AP is not the only State facing shortage of power as Gujarat and Maharashtra are also facing similar problem in meeting the demand forcing them to impose power holiday for industries and resorting to load-shedding for domestic consumers. He described the current crisis in AP as temporary and hoped that the problem would be overcome by month-end.