AP Using All It’s Power Produced And Putting Southern Grid At Risk Of Collapse!

The Southern Grid is facing grave risk due to the adamant behaviour of the AP Generation Corporation. “Andhra Pradesh is playing an extremely dangerous game with the Southern Region Load Despatch Centre, Bangalore. Given its behaviour today, the grid can collapse if AP overdraws,” a top official source told a national daily. 

Noticing the seriousness of the situation, Telangana chief minister Mr K Chandrashekar Rao rushed power secretary Mr Suresh Chanda to Delhi this evening. The latter also spoke to the secretary, Union ministry of power and NTPC authorities. Mr Rao asked officials to immediately talk with other states to purchase power if the situation demands. The chief engineer of the AP Genco has to give the production schedule a day in advance to the Bangalore Centre. AP is treating its power projects as its state projects and not as inter-state projects. 

The AP Reorganisation Act mandates that AP and Telangana share power from inter-state projects for a period of two years after bifurcation. Today AP Genco refused to give operational details to the Bangalore centre, as the “power projects in Andhra are not inter-state projects”. The Bangalore centre bears the overall responsibility of the Southern Grid comprising of six states ~AP, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala and Karnataka. 

It, however, overcame its initial shock and immediately embarked on an alternate mode. Starting from the wee hours of the day it began sourcing generation details through a system, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. This allows the Bangalore centre to remotely access power generation details through coded signals. They have been thus accessing data every fifteen minutes through the day.  While sharing this information with the Telangana officials they aired their biggest fear. Under the circumstances if AP resorts to overdrawing, by exceeding its share of below 50 per cent under the Reorganisation Act, then the Southern Grid is bound to collapse. 

Telangana officials say that the Bangalore centre is keeping the Northern Region Load Despatch Centre, Delhi informed about these unusual sequence of events 
Last night AP State Load Despatch Centre sent a letter to the Banglore centre explicitly stating that only they would be consuming power from the plants in Andhra. It said it is acting under instructions from the AP government. After it’s repeated requests to APGENCO for details of their power production getting rejected, The Power Systems Operation Corporation Limited (POSOCO) wrote to the NLDC, Delhi drawing it’s attention to fears of a grid collapse in south. The NLDC in turn wrote to Central Electricity Authority (CEC). The CEC directed its Southern Regional Power Committee (SRPC) Member Secretary SR Bhatt to meet the Chief Engineer, APSLDC. A meeting has beens scheduled at 11 AM, 24 June to discuss the matter and avert the imminent danger of a collapse of Southern Grid.