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In the background of power availability in Tamil Nadu having become the subject matter of astrology rather than of technology, and the maddeningly prolonged power cuts being seen as one of the prime reasons for the humiliating defeat of the DMK alliance, I was not surprised to be told, when I wanted to talk to the top bosses of the State's Electricity Board (TNEB) and the Generation and Distribution Corporation on the morrow of the swearing-in of the new Government, that all of them had rushed to meet the Chief Minister and the Power Minister on urgent summons. This is welcome evidence of the determination of the AIADMK Government to bend its energies to efforts to alleviate the miseries of all sections of consumers on this account without loss of time.
Enforcing discipline
The very fact of the Government giving the highest priority to the vital task of restoring a degree of predictability in power supply will hopefully lead to the personnel of the generation and distribution shedding their slackness and indifference in the performance of their duties. The work environment, in general, is bound to improve in the regime of the new Chief Minister, Ms J. Jayalalithaa, as the Government and public sector employees have known from their experience during her earlier tenure, that she will stick at nothing to enforce maximum output and discipline.
But that does not mean that intrinsic problems of power shortage and delays in execution of sanctioned projects, when viewed against the ineluctably burgeoning demand, will solve themselves. Without cluttering this column with figures, in intelligible terms, taking into account the TNEB's own current generation and distribution capacity, the quantum of power from Central agencies and the private sector and the provision for phased maintenance and insurance against sudden outages, the Government has to make good as of now a deficit of as much as 3600 MW.
As against this, about 2400 MW worth of ongoing projects are expected to be commissioned by end-2011 and an additional 2500 MW by end-2012. By that time, maintaining the average per capita consumption at the existing 1000 units but allowing for increase in the number consumers and the tempo of industrialisation and economic growth, the deficit will surely treble to around 10,000 MW by end-2012, against which the net addition, assuming everything to be on schedule, will be less than 5000 MW.
Greasy pole
Actually, the first law of power dynamics is that all promises of power availability will turn out to be overestimates and all figures of demand for power will prove to be underestimates. Therefore, too fine a calculation of potential demand and supply will only land the planners in a frightful mess. Also, there can never be a surfeit of power, for, in its case, one should go by Say's Law, (Any amount of supply will find its own demand), and the common sense aphorism that no power is costlier than no power.
The State will find itself engaged in what is akin to climbing a greasy pole if it depends on the conventional approaches to power management. Increasingly, it will find methods such as rotational load shedding, demand and energy cut for high tension industrial and commercial consumers, evening peak hour restrictions for high tension industrial consumers, roster for power supply for agriculture, and so on, become totally inadequate to bring the situation under control and it will be face-to-face with a credibility crisis of its own making.
The immediate and imperative need is a strategy to meet the exploding demand by having many more power stations than actually planned, exploiting in full the non-conventional and renewable sources of energy, mobilising private investment on a commensurate scale and speeding up construction by tightening supervision at project sites.
Since each of these has enormous implications bearing on managerial, technical, technological, financial and human resources, the Government should set up an Empowered Group of Eminent Energy Experts to come up with its proposals within a month or so.
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