As the inflows into Jurala from the upstream reservoir Narayanpur in Karnataka kept rising, the Telangana State Power Generation Corporation (TS-Genco) has taken up hydro-electric generation at its 6×39 MW power plant at Priyadarshini Jurala project by switching on two units around noon on Tuesday.

Commencement of early flood from the upstream of Krishna river has enabled hydel generation almost two weeks in advance at Jurala, compared to last year. In 2019, power generation could begin only on July 30.

However, 2019-20 has been one of the best years for hydro power generation in Telangana as over 640 million units of power was generated at Jurala and Lower Jurala hydel stations alone. Total hydel generation during 2019-20 was over 4,509 million units out of TS-Genco’s total own generation of thermal, hydel and solar power generation of 25,536 million units.

“With the commencement of hydel generation at Jurala, we hope to at least repeat last year’s feat as the meteorological department has forecast good monsoon this year too. Hydro power generated so far, mostly at Nagarjunasagar and Srisailam this year (2020-21), has been 52.5 million units till July 13,” a senior official of TS-Genco explained.

Hydel generation at Jurala was taken up once the inflows reached 14,000 cusecs and by switching on two units. About 13,400 cusecs of water was let into the river course through power generation and one more hydel unit was switched on as the inflows increased to 22,000 cusecs in the afternoon and the discharge into the river course from power generation went up to 15,400 cusecs.

According to the irrigation engineers at Jurala, the inflows increased steadily on Tuesday from about 4,150 cusecs in the morning to 14,000 cusecs by noon and to 22,000 cusecs by afternoon. “It’s expected to increase further and likely to reach about 40,000 cusecs by Wednesday morning as over 45,000 cusecs of water from the spillway and power house was being released at Narayanpur,” he said.

From the upstream Almatti, Narayanpur was getting about 45,000 cusecs from power house and with supplementation from streams/rivulets in between, it was still getting inflows of about 47,000 cusecs. Although the inflows into Almatti came down to about 41,800 cusecs on Tuesday morning, the Central Water Commission (CWC) has indicated that it would continue to get good inflows even if there were no rains in the catchment areas upstream.