Andhra Pradesh

State purchases power from three States

HYDERABAD: Faced with increasing agricultural demand, AP Transco has begun purchasing about five million units of power a day from Sikkim, Orissa and Karnataka.

The utility is buying 110 MW from Jindal and Renuka Sugars in Karnakata, 50-75 MW from Adani in Sikkim and 50 MW from Reliance in Orissa, apart from 70 MW from Nav Bharat and Manugur Heavy Water Plant, both in the State. At the same time, a high level meeting here on Wednesday which was presided over by Transco chairperson Rachel Chatterjee, decided to place bulk orders for naphtha with the Hindustan Petroleum Corporation and Bharat Petroleum Corporation for Lanco, GVK, Spectrum and Reliance Energy. Officials of the petroleum companies agreed to transport 10,000 tonnes of naphtha immediately for use by Lanco.

A senior Transco official later told The Hindu that all these measures were part of a strategy aimed at preserving the water available in Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar reservoirs for use in summer months when the demand is expected to cross 200 million unit mark. At present, a quantity of 170 tmcft of water is available in Srisailam project above the minimum storage level required for power generation, and 41 tmcft in Nagarjunasagar. With these live storages, 929 mu can be generated at Srisailam and 226 at Nagarjunasagar.

Meanwhile, there was outage of eight generation units due to various technical problems causing huge loss of power.

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