At 3971 MW, Mumbai's power demand breaches Wednesday's all-time high

MUMBAI: The peak power demand in Mumbai was at an all-time high of 3971 megawatts (MW) on Thursday afternoon, surpassing the previous day's record high figure of 3968MW.
Experts said with the rising temperature and humidity in the city, the peak demand may soon touch the 4000MW-mark. On Thursday, the maximum temperature hovered around 34 degrees Celsius and the relative humidity recorded by the IMD Colaba and Santacruz weather stations were 72% and 61%, respectively.
There were not many cases of power cuts as reported on Wednesday. Citizens tweeted from parts of the city, including Bandra and Malad, to register complaints of outages, which power utility firms said were due to "local cable faults".
An official from Tata Power said the Trombay generation on Thursday was 720MW and it distributed 980MW in its supply areas. A source from Tata Power said they have a back-up plan wherein they can supply up to 1400MW as against the peak demand of nearly 1000MW, while BEST has signed power purchase agreements to cater to over 900MW in the island city. Adani Electricity said it is well equipped with the required network infrastructure and power contracts to meet the rising demand.
A senior MSEDCL official said in the past three months of summer, when the peak load was high - between 24,000MW and 25,000MW for the state power utility - it had catered to the demand by purchasing expensive electricity from the power exchange. "We have procured additional electricity of 1340 million units from the central power exchange and through power purchase agreements with generators. This ensured that we could supply electricity to every household, commercial and industrial unit," said MSEDCL managing director Vijay Singhal.
It is learnt that MSEDCL had a 'power-banking' system with Punjab and few other states. This is an arrangement wherein two utilities/states trade power to match the seasonal variations in surplus and deficit situations. Banking is cashless transaction, wherein no tariff needs to be paid for the energy availed/supplied.
"We had given power to Punjab and few other states when we had a surplus. Therefore, during our crisis situation, we got power from some of these states which helped us to some extent," Singhal said, adding that there was no load shedding across Maharashtra. "If any outage has occurred, it was due to technical fault," he added.