Its official, government begins power cuts

BANGALORE: It’s now official. Rural Karnataka will grope in the dark as the state government decided to impose eight-hour scheduled load shedding from Monday. Urban areas will have onehour power cut while Bangalore will continue to get uninterrupted power supply.The Energy Department, however, is considering staggered holidays for industries in Bangalore if the situation worsens. The government has called a meeting of industry representatives on Tuesday in this regard. The decision stems from disruption of coal supply to thermal plants due to Telangana protests in Andhra Pradesh.Load shedding will continue till the situation in Andhra normalises. A high-level meeting chaired by Energy Minister Shobha Karandlaje on Monday decided to go in for load shedding, which was hitherto in practice unofficially. “We have no option but to resort to load shedding. Efforts to buy power from the open market failed to yield results due to a lack of free transmission corridors,” Karandlaje told reporters. According to the decision, all cities except Bangalore will have one-hour load shedding between 6 pm and 10 pm whereas it will be eight hours a day in rural areas.The timing of the load shedding will be fixed by electricity supply companies.For rural areas, there will be three-phase power for three hours any time between 1 pm and 6 pm and single phase from 6 pm and 6 am. Hitherto, villages used to get three phase power from 6 am to 1 pm. The state currently generates around 130 million units of power a day against the demand for 160 MUs.Meanwhile, the government is continuing its efforts to tap available sources like co-generation units. “According to our estimates, around 200 MW is being sold by the state’s cogeneration units in the open market. We want to tap it. We have convened a meeting of all co-gen units on Tuesday,” Karandlaje said.