REINING IN POWER TRANSMISSION LOSSES
Haryana may go for Punjab model
Tribune News Service

Ambala, January 10
The All-India Power Engineers Federation today stated here that chairman and managing director of the state power utilities Devender Singh had expressed his willingness to adopt the Punjab model to bring down the Aggregate Transmission and Commercial (AT&C) losses.

The engineers had put up a presentation before him, following which he assured them that the Punjab model would be adopted after a discussion with senior officers.

Padamjit Singh, chairman of the All-India Power Engineers Federation, said in Haryana, the AT&C losses were in the range of 20 to 30 per cent in urban domestic feeders and 50 to 70 per cent in rural areas and they are mainly commercial losses.

These, he said, could be brought down to 10 to 15 per cent in urban areas and 20 to 25 per cent in rural areas under the Punjab pattern.

Bhupinder Singh, secretary-general of the Northern India Power Engineers Federation, who made a presentation before the Haryana Power Utilities management, said the gains from the low-cost strategies to reduce line losses could be successfully adopted in the state, which at present was working on modalities to introduce the franchisee system to reduce the losses.

He said the investment made on improving the system could be recovered within a period of one year of implementation.

Bhupinder Singh said besides improving the quality of supply, the recommended model had reduced the Aggregate Transmission and Commercial losses in Punjab from 22 per cent in year 2009-10 to 19 per cent by the end of March, 2012.

While the system reliability index showed an improvement of 99.75 per cent, the damage rate of distribution transformers had also been reduced significantly.

He said in its pilot project which was introduced in Patiala, the power utilities of Punjab had incurred an expenditure of Rs 34 crore after which they saved 233 lakh units of energy.