States asked not to overdraw from grid

NEW DELHI: The Northern Regio:nal Load Dispatch Centre has sent an SOS to all northern states to curtail overdrawing in Northern Grid. The alert issued after high power demand in the northern region caused fluctuations in grid frequency this week.

All states have been asked to be on alert. Delhi is one of the northern region constituents and has been seeing an unusually high power demand in the second fortnight of August, as compared to previous years.

NRLDC had tightened grid frequency bandwidth last year to ensure grid stability, but reports came in that some states like UP, Rajasthan and Jammu & Kashmir were overdrawing heavily from the grid to meet the load demand. The situation has been aggravated because NRLDC said some power units had pulled out from generation due to the ongoing coal shortage. "Some of the states are heavily overdrawing and the frequency of the system 50% of the times remains below 49.9Hz. Some of the units at inter state generating stations and state generating stations are already non operational due to coal issues such as Rihand/Singrauli complex, Dadri Thermal, Badarpur, etc," NRLDC said.