India’s power deficit comes down from 2% in April to 0.6% in June: RK Singh

New Delhi: Power deficit came down from 2 percent in April to 0.4 percent in May and 0.6 percent in June despite a significant rise in demand of electricity, Parliament was informed on Thursday.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Power Minister RK Singh said electricity supplied grew 12.8 percent in April 2022, as compared to the year-ago month, across India.

Power requirement, on the other hand grew 14.7 percent in April on all-India basis, resulting in a deficit of 2 percent.

"The gap between energy requirement and energy supplied had been reduced considerably…to 0.4 percent and 0.6 percent during the months of May 2022 and June 2022 respectively, despite the significant increase in energy requirement during these months as compared to the corresponding months of May 2021 and June 2021," he said.

The gap between energy demand and supply is generally on account of factors other than inadequacy of power availability in the country e.g. constraints in the distribution network, financial constraints, commercial reasons, forced outage of generating units etc, he explained.

He said the coal stock available at the power plants monitored by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) on daily basis was about 25.6 Million Tonnes (MT) as on March 31, 2022.

The stock depleted to 21.9 MT as of April 30, 2022, but increased during May and June and has now reached 28.7 MT as of July 21, 2022, which is sufficient for an average of 10 days at a requirement of 85 percent Plant Load Factor (PLF), he added.

In another reply, the minister said the cumulative inter-regional transmission capacity of the National Grid as of June 30, 2022, is 1,12,250 MW, which is likely to get enhanced to 1,18,050 MW by the end of 2023.

In another reply, he said the industrial consumers consume the maximum electricity at 41.16 percent followed by the domestic consumers (25.77 percent), agriculture consumers (17.67 percent) and commercial 8.29 percent.

Singh also told the House that the power supply hours in urban areas and rural areas as on July 8, 2022, was 23.78 hours and 21.48 hours, respectively.

(With PTI inputs)

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