Dark days ahead as many TNEB's plants develop snags

M. Ramesh

Chennai, July 12

Dark days stare electricity consumers in the face as several of TNEB's plants developed snags on Sunday.

Tamil Nadu Electricity Board suffered “forced outage” of 1,298 MW on Sunday. Including the 337 MW of “planned outage”, the total loss of power worked out to 1,635 MW.

Of the ‘forced outage', technicalese for ‘gone kaputt', 123 MW was due to the Kaiga Atomic Power Station, which is not in TNEB's control. Incidentally, this plant has been shut for 23 days now because of ‘high turbine vibration'. Another 250 MW was lost due to a tube puncture at ST-CMS power plant, which is a private sector owned station. This plant has been shut for two days.

The leaks could not have come at a worse time, because unlike last month, support from the windmills appears to be falling.

June was a good windy month and the windmills in the state generated 1.18 billion units of electricity, higher than 1 billion units in the same month last year. On the last day of June, the generation was at a record 58 million units.

However, generation from the mills has been coming down. On Sunday, generation was only 5.4 million units.