While the country's power sector faces an increased demand for electricity, industries in power-starved Maharahstra are exploring the option of using their own captive power plants to dilute the crunch.
CII's Pune unit has submitted a proposal to extenuate the power deficit for the Pune urban circle by using the electricity generated from captive power plants of around 30 industrial units for their own consumption, sources said.
With this ingestion, the units would be saving around 90 MW of electricity, which they get from Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited, the state power distribution utility. As a result, much of this energy will be supplied for city's domestic consumption.
Maharashtra is presently facing a power crunch of about 4,000 MW a day, which has resulted in urban areas (excluding parts of Mumbai) facing a minimum power cut of 4-6 hours a day.
Pune currently faces a daily shortage of around 100 MW with a normal consumption demand of 690-700 MW in summer.
The industrial units have a total daily generation capacity of about 90 MW and have sought compensation for the costs occured by them to run the plants.
The trade body proposes to get the refund for the additional costs borne by its memebers, from the consumers or the government, which could pay this amount as a subsidy.
The additional amount is worked around 34-43 paise per unit, which is to be finalised very soon.
Besides, it has proposed to get half of this deficit (about 50 MW) from NTPC's Kawas plant to fuel city's power needs.
Presently, efforts are on to reach a peak over the issue of sharing the additional burden between the customers and the state government as well as to finalise the cost structure of this burden.
Graham Pugh, assistant secretary of the US energy department, recently lauded the Akshay Prakash scheme, the energy saving initiative of MSEDCL.
The scheme, followed mostly in small villages in the state, is based on active participation and self discipline of the villagers. It guarantees 23 hours of power supply to the participating villages, where villagers voluntarily stop using high power consuming gadgets like heaters and hotplates.
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