Financially weak discoms will find it tough to get loans from PFC, REC: Power secretary SN Sahai
Power demand has been going up since September and it is up 5.5 percent on a year-on-year basis in December last month, said SN Sahai, Power Secretary on Monday. Indian power demand hit a peak high last week on one single day that was an all-time high surpassing what had happened in 2019 May.
Speaking to CNBC-TV18, SN Sahai shed light on what is driving this demand and whether we can expect more such peaks with incremental consumption of power.
On demand, the Power Secretary said, “The power demand has been going up since September; September it was about 5 percent higher and October over 11 percent higher as compared to 2019. Since September the power demand is up.”
On discom package, Sahai said, “This Rs 90,000 crore package that is for infusion of liquidity under the Atmanirbhar Bharat scheme and it was to be done in two tranches. The first tranche is over, we have given Rs 45,000 crore to various discoms and there were conditioned on meeting certain things like smart metering, etc. For phase-II, once they meet the requirements of phase-I they will get the tranche II so that is Rs 90,000 crore.”
Speaking on receivables of discoms, losses and the next tranche of liquidity, he said, “The receivables of discoms are the highest from the government, as well as payments of subsidises by the government.
