Reddy, who reviewed the power situation here on Tuesday, wrote the letter to the prime minister explaining the critical situation the state is passing through with regard to the power sector.
He said while the present generation of thermal power was a little over 2200 MW, the power consumption in the state was around 7000 MW. Despite buying power and drawing from the central quota and overdrawing from the southern grid, the shortage reported on Tuesday was to the tune of 1200 MW.
Apart from meeting the present demand, what is causing worry to the government is the increasing demand for industrial power in view of the various mineral based industries such as alumina and aluminium plants, titanium, sponge metal and steel plants. Besides new cement plants are being built while the existing ones are expanding their capacity. Added to this, the state government is also embarking on several joint ventures with some new major industries, which require thermal power for captive consumption. To meet the future demand, the state government is in the process of promoting new thermal units which require coal.
Meeting the demand for coal to the existing thermal units itself is becoming difficult and most of the power stations are running on a very low coal reserves. Some units have stocks for just one day.
The Kothagudem and Rayalaseema thermal units have shut down one unit each for lack of coal resulting in further loss of power generation. It is in this backdrop that the state government has urged the Centre to speed up the process of allocating Thadicherla coal block II to APMDC.
The recent rains have not helped the power utilities as the shortage continues to rise and no inflows have been reported into Srisailam reservoir.
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