Power demand in Patna up by 25% in a week

PATNA: As the state capital continues to reel under an intense heatwave, the power demand has increased by 25.7% in just one week because of the cooling load of airconditioners, coolers and fans. As a result, various parts of the city have been witnessing outages, unscheduled power cuts or technical snags.
As per the data of the Patna Electric Supply Undertaking (PESU), which undertakes power supply work in Patna and some peripheral areas, the power consumption broke its previous record for April after the total power consumption on Sunday recorded at 621 megawatt (MW). The previous all-time high power consumption in a day was recorded at 733MW in June 13 last year. According to officials, the power demand may surge further amid early warnings of heatwave to continue.

Murtaza Hilal, general manager of PESU, said initial hiccups like shedding, overloading and short-circuit in transformers occur when the weather changes. "Heatwave itself does not cause power outage. Instead, the high temperatures force people to increase the use of their airconditioning. It takes time for the system to adopt the sudden change in power consumption. Things will settle down after a few days. In some places, the power cuts take place due to cleaning of drains and ongoing development projects related to road, flyover and metro," he said.
The GM told TOI that previous year, the peak demand was above 700MW in June and July, but this time they expect it will go up to 800MW in May. "The power demand was 592MW around this time in 2022 and 540MW in 2021. This year, the demand increased above 600MW from April-mid as the summer set in early with intense heatwave condition, prompting people to use cooling device. We have observed cooling load is the main factor behind the increase in power demand as most of the consumers are using ACs," he said.
"PESU has made all arrangements to supply uninterrupted power to the consumers and the discom is ready to meet the demand. The total capacity of the sub-stations is 1,705 MW," the GM added.
Two additional power substations have been installed at Patliputra Industrial Area and Chajjubagh. With this, total power substations have increased to 71 under the PESU, which is divided into 13 divisions. Besides, 25 new transformers have been installed, where there is overloading issues.