After the North and North-East suffered the world’s biggest blackout, the Government is now looking for long-term measures, such as ‘islandisation’, to prevent a repeat of such major grid collapses.
Addressing the media after taking office, Power Minister Veerappa Moily promised there would be no repeat of grid failure.
Long-term measures
Power Secretary P. Umashankar said some long-term measures would be formulated to prevent such failures. ‘Islanding’ could be one of these measures, he added. This will contain power cuts within a given area even if the grid fails.
The Secretary gave no further details on implementation of islandisation — whether it would be done on a geographical basis or if it would focus on important centres such as Metro, Railways or hospitals that were worst affected in the past two days.
Fault-finding task
The Power Ministry said he was still trying to ascertain the ‘primary cause’ of two consecutive days’ massive power failure.
What was assumed to be the main reason — States overdrawal — has been denied by most of the constituencies concerned. The Government has left the fault-finding job and the measures to be taken to an expert committee set up by the former Power Minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, after the first day of the Northern Grid failure.
The panel is likely to submit its report in two weeks.
Moily, on his first day at the Power Ministry, said he would look into all the issues in the sector, one-by one.
Chief Ministers’ Meeting
He would discuss the issues, including grid failure, with Chief Ministers’ of all the affected States in the second week of this month.
“We will have to go deeper into the issues. This is not so simple. Some lessons have to be learned from accidents. We will ensure that the grid will work perfectly well. We do not want to play a blame game. Grid discipline is vital and States are major stakeholders,” he said.
The Minister said that special attention will have to paid to regions where the loss levels are very high.
“The all-India average for AT&C losses is 27.15 per cent. For the South, it is 19.48 per cent, whereas the North-Eastern region has 36.44 per cent loss,” he added.