AGARTALA, May 12 (TIWN): Tripura is facing serious load-shedding problem due to drop of supply within state. Life and business has been largely affected due to power cuts enforced for long hours every day. Load shedding in Tripura has made life miserable as the Palatana power plant tripped for sometime due to a fault in the turbines, said Chairman-cum-Managing Director (CMD) of TSECL- Sunil Kumar Roy said. Talking to TIWN on Tuesday in regard of the load shedding across the state Roy said that due to some minor faults in the power generation unit at Palatana, the Tripura State Electricity Corporation Ltd. (TSECL) is unable to take power from the plant. He said, at present the TSECL is taking around 250 MW from the Palatana Power Plant during the peak hour, but the plant sometime trips, as a result the state is facing load shedding recently. However the deficit of power has forced the TSECL to maintain load-shedding across the state with increased timing. As the TSECL started to manage shortage in power supply, the people of the state have been facing, frequent load-shedding more than 2 hours during last two week. CMD of TSECL assured that power-cut timing will be reduced once the power plants start generating power as per the target.

 In rural areas, longer hours of load-shedding are in force to make up for the shortfall in the availability of power. 

The situation is worsened by the growing demand for power as the sweltering summer months arrived.

It is to be mentioned here that recently Power Minister Manik Dey said that Rukhia, Baramura, Monarchak at Sonamura, Ramchandranagar and Palatana are facing crisis of gas from ONGC as a result the power production from the plants has decreased recently. Adding he said that due to insufficient gas supply from the ONGC the power plants installed here in the state are unable to meet the demand of power.

Minister also said that due to the lack of gas the Palatana Power plant Unit-II is currently able to supply only 250MW-300MW, Baramura is currently supplying 30MW-35MW, Rukhia only 45MW-50MW. “Following the less production from the power plants here in the state the state is yet dependent on other states to bring power of at least 40MW to 45MW,” adding Dey said, “Due to this problem we have to give load shedding for only 45 minutes, but the problems would be resolved soon after the Palatana OTPC starts full generation of power from its both the unit.”

Tripura state electricity corporation (TSECL) is now under constraint to enforce frequent load shedding to deal with shortage of power available from the power plants installed here.