Disrupted transmission network pushes Delhi in dark

NEW DELHI: Several parts of New Delhi suffered of power cuts for hours, from Friday evening to Saturday, due to failure of a transmission line that supplies electricity to three distribution companies of the national capital. To make the matter worse for Delhiites, electricity supplies turned erratic when mercury is at its 11 year high record of over 46 degree Celsius.

The electricity supply may continue to remain erratic till next week if Delhi government’s transmission company is unable to restore its network, said an executive with one of the discoms. On Saturday evening, Delhi government called a meet of transmission and distribution companies’ executives to take the toll of the situation.

At 12:45 and 2:30 am on Friday, state government controlled Delhi Transmission Ltd’s lines from Bawana tripped, Tata Power Delhi said in a statement. This resulted in load shedding in Narela, Sarup Nagar, Jahangir Puri, Ashok Vihar and Tri Nagar areas. Similarly, residents of Tilak Nagar and Mayur Vihar lived in dark sweating in the distributon areas of BSES discoms.

On Friday night, helplines of BSES Yamuna, BSES Rajdhani and Tata Power Delhi Distribution remained busy or completely idle as there was no possibility of restoring supplies immediately. Those disturbed with the erratic electricity for past few days even called Power Minister Piyush Goyal who visited Gujarat on Friday to take lessons from the success of its utilities.

This is the second time in the last nine days that Delhi Transmission’s network could not transmit power to three discoms that said that the situation post storm of May 30 would have been handled without disturbance, if the commissioning of 220 KV Wazirpur Grid with incoming power from 400 kv Mundka Substation had been completed in time. On Saturday, Tata Power Delhi wrote to Delhi government to augment transmission capacity of its transmission arm.