With slight improvement in the power supply situation due to resumption of one of the damaged Talwandi Sabo thermal power generating units, the state government on Monday decided to ease off all power regulatory restrictions on industrial consumers, except those using continuous power, with immediate effect.
Disclosing this here today, Chairman-cum-Managing Director (CMD) Punjab State Power Corporation Limited A Venu Prasad said that all industrial consumers in districts falling in central and border zones have been allowed to operate at full capacity from today. Only the Continuous Process Industries including Textile, Chemicals, and Spinning Mills, which undertake round the clock operations would now be required to follow restrictions as applied earlier. He said that these guidelines would be reviewed once again after three days to take fresh decision.
It may be recalled that owing to unprecedented rise in demand of power, the PSPCL had as a temporary measure ordered restrictions on Industrial consumers of the State in order to provide continuous power supply to Domestic consumers and 8 hours power supply to the Agriculture sector for paddy operations. Continous process industries, as of now, have been asked to operate at 50% of continuous process load, a department spokesperson said.
The department, despite high demand for consumption had not imposed any restrictions on small and medium supply industrial consumers, rice shellers, cattle feed units, call centres, mushroom farms, food processing units and other essential Industries/services from the beginning, the spokesperson further revealed.
Punjab has 99,834 small power industrial consumers besides 30,176 medium power consumers upon whom no usage restriction has been levied at all despite rising demand for power across domestic sector. To meet up demand supply, large supply consumers (5071 in number) which use 1000 KVA SCD had been asked to use 100 KVA for 12 hours a day. Large supply arc furnaces, of which 282 operate in state, had been restricted to 5% of SCD only.
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The spokesperson said that despite the failure of TSPL Plant, PSPCL had successfully met highest ever energy demand of 3066 lakh units on July 1. The day’s demand had surpassed the earlier record of 3018 lakh units of power supply in a single day in the state.