Bengaluru spared of outages after government makes emergency power purchase

BENGALURU: Power cuts across the city continued on Wednesday morning in several areas because of a shortage of supply. However, with emergency power purchases reaching the city, the situation was normal in the afternoon, officials said.

The shortage, according to sources, is because of one unit of the Bellary Thermal Power Station (BTPS) being stopped due to coal shortage and another unit of the Udupi Power Corporation Ltd (UPCL) failing because of a technical problem. This led to a shortage of 1,500 mega watts (MW) for Bengaluru on Tuesday.

“The situation is normal since Wednesday afternoon as around 800 MW was injected into the grid. This is a combination of short term power purchase and electricity purchased from the energy exchange. We expect this additional power to be sufficient to meet the demand, which is low right now because of the weather,” BESCOM Managing Director P Rajendra Cholan said.

On Wednesday, the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FKCCI) also spoke out against the power cuts across the state. “The unscheduled power cuts are sending production schedules haywire, resulting in major quality and production breakdowns. Firms are unable to manage export commitments and it affects future business orders. We urge the government to take urgent steps to restore normal power supply to traders and industries in Karnataka,” said FKCCI president K Ravi.

1912 busy all the time, say customers
The BESCOM helpline is being criticised for being unreachable every time there are city wide power cuts. The helpline, which according to the BESCOM website, has 120 staff members manning the phone lines is often unable to deal with the volume of calls during rains or times of load shedding. However, officials said other methods of filing complaints like the SMS facility to 58888 or the online complaint portal at http://www.bescom.ipgrs.org/ can also be used to file complaints.