India's power backup bill Rs 130,000 cr a year

NEW DELHI: It���s not just suffering the blackouts. The cumulative cost of nationwide power outages is a staggering Rs 1,00,000 crore. That���s the amount Indians spend on power back-up equipment like gensets, batteries and inverters, according to a study by Universal Consulting done for power company Wartsila India. Here���s the message for policy makers: That money if collected from harassed power consumers is enough to put up power plants to generate 25,000 MW of electricity ��� almost 20% of the present generation level.

Besides, the country also spends Rs 30,000 crore every year to operate inefficient power back-ups using gensets which belch smoke and inverters that emit acid fumes. According to the study, because of the inefficient power back-up systems, the equipment release an additional 1.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide additionally every year.

Highlighting key findings of the study, Rakesh Sarin, MD of Wartsila India, a subsidiary of the Finland-based major, said a ���reliability surcharge��� of 50 paisa per unit, which is far less than the extra charges consumers are incurring to maintain the backup, can support rapid capacity build-up.

In one of the projections, Power Grid Corporation of India has estimated the value of lost opportunity for the country in 2008-09 at Rs 2,89,000 crore. In GDP terms, this means a loss of nearly 6%.

Sarin said the correlation between growth in GDP and addition to power generation capacity is close to 1. This means that to realize our ambition to grow by 9%, India needs power generation to grow by 9% annually after wiping out the substantial existing deficit.

On the brighter side, Sarin said, there are examples of consumers, like in Mumbai, who benefit from a 24x7 reliable power supply by paying a reliability charge. Consumers bear significant annual operating expenses for back-up power equal to almost one-third of the capital costs. The efficiency level of such equipment is often poor. Besides, fuels such as diesel are subsidized by the government, adding to the tax-payers��� burden, he added.