South seeing power price hikes owing to outages

Kolkata: Southern states are witnessing an increase in power prices at the exchange level owing to outages of transmission links connecting the region with the rest of India which have led to power line congestion. Coupled with outages of power generation units and increasing irrigation demand, the development has resulted in a failure to attain the desired “one nation, one price” for the past several days.

“Outage of around 800 mw of transmission lines connecting south India from west and east is pushing up prices for south India. Over the last 12 days power prices for delivery to the region have been higher by 4-5% over the national average price at the Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) and it is expected to continue till December 31,” said Rajesh K Mediratta, director, business development, IEX.

Rohit Bajaj, head-business development at IEX, said: “A high voltage substation at Bhadrawati in Maharashtra is also down from 15th Dec and is scheduled to be back on January 1. It receives power from western India and transmits it to south, resulting in around 500 mw of import capacity reduction in the region.”