Temp rises, no end to Noida’s power woes

Noida: The city continues to reel from daily power outages at intervals of 2 to 5 hours in some sectors, as the mercury continues to rise. The temperature is likely to hit 45 degrees Celsius next week. Referring to the UP government’s recent claim of 39% increase in transmission and calling it ‘a joke’, residents of some sectors have decided to take up the issue with the local MLA.
“Noida, which is supposed to be a ‘no power cut zone’, witnesses intermittent cuts to long outages throughout the day for many days now. The outages occur at random hours of the day, ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours,” said Brigadier (retd) Ashok Hak, a resident of Sector 28.
Hak, Confederation of NCR RWA (CONRWA) convener for Noida, said the key problems are old infrastructure, circuit breakers and poor cabling. “The ‘no power zone’ is a dream gone sour,” said Hak, adding that CONRWA will raise the issue with MLA Pankaj Singh as well as both superintending engineers of Electricity Urban Distribution Circle (EUDC) 1 and 2 of Pashchimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Limited (PVVNL).
Colonel (retd) Shashi Vaid, chairman of Arun Vihar RWA, said that the sectors are suffering from unprecedented power failures. “The duration of these outages extend to four to five hours on some days. They are mostly unannounced. In case of a planned shutdown, no SMS is sent to inform us. Upon inquiry, no reason or estimated time for restoration of supply is provided,” Vaid said. The situation is almost same across sectors 11, 12, 19, 20, 25, 28, 29, 37, 30, 31, 34, 35, 40, 44, 51, 92, 93, 120 and 126.
Meanwhile Vivek Aggarwal, superintending engineer, (EUDC Division 1) PVVNL did not respond to calls or messages by TOI. Puneet Gupta, executive engineer, EUDC transmission - I Noida, said that there is no shutdown or outage from the transmission end.
“There may be tripping and breakdown in 11 kV distribution feeders which are being looked into,” said Gupta.