Govt dues, worker incompetence causes for frequent power cuts

Soumik Dutta | NT

Bengaluru: Karnataka, as a state has surplus power and suffers low losses at the transmission level, but Bengaluru’s frequent power cuts continue unabated the year round. Be it the old Central Business District areas or the outskirts, no area is immune to the power cuts. Bescom, the city’s only power distribution company secured B+ in the report of the 11th annual integrated rating and ranking of power distribution utilities for the FY 2021-2022, across 57 entities in India.

The ranking is done by the Ministry of Power (MoP) along with the Power Finance Corporation (PFC), based on audited financial reports and other data. In April last year Bescom had filed an application at the Karnataka State Electricity Regulatory Commission (KERC) for a tariff revision on average by Rs 1.58 paisa across all categories , to meet revenue gap of Rs 4609.56 Cr(2185.29 Cr for FY 21, and 2424.27 Cr for FY 23).

The additional revenue through tariff revision works out to approximately Rs4609.56 Cr. Various initiatives have been undertaken by Bescom to overcome the deficit of ?1,412 crore for the on-going business year 2022-23. So it’s no surprise that in reliability indices for the financial year 2020-21, Bengaluru is way below that of national capital Delhi.

The reliability indices are reported by distribution companies like Bescom to the Central Electricity Authority (CEA). Bescom is a state government-owned entity which has monopoly of power distribution in Bengaluru and surrounding districts. The Network reliability is specifically measured by Saifi (System Average Interruption Frequency Index) & SAIDI (System Average Interruption duration Index), two global standards of measuring the power reliability for a specific consumer.

Saifi is the average number of interruptions that a customer would experience whereas SAIDI is the total duration of an outage experience in a particular SAIFI event for a customer. Karnataka, as a state, has surplus power and suffers low losses at the transmission level. But the distribution sector is the weak link in the system.

The lack of a proper distribution network infrastructure and its inadequate operation and maintenance are the major reasons behind these power cuts. Poor network maintenance coupled with overloading and lightning can result in the frequent breakdown of distribution transformers, which are the last-mile assets in sending power to consumers. Bescom classifies power cuts into two types; planned outage and unplanned outage.

Some of the unplanned outages are due to rain and heavy winds when Bescom stops supply of power fearing that wires or poles may be damaged and create harm to life. In other cases, it is unforeseen issues like cable faults or tripping of transformers. But a majority of these power outages are planned. Majority of the power cuts over the last few years are due to the conversion of overhead power lines and transformers into underground lines.

Other than this, there are upgrades of old infrastructures like transformers and ring main units to newer ones. There are sometimes issues due to damage to cables caused by road widening works or laying of other utility lines. With more than 50% of Bengaluru’s power cables shifted underground as told by Bescom officials, the rain related problems will soon be eliminated but that will not solve the operation and maintenance (O&M) problems.

Power sector experts suggest that an effective maintenance strategy that includes energy audit at distribution transformer level and deploys distribution life cycle management systems (DTLMS) could help in mitigating issues related to transformer failures causing power cuts.