Sandesh Prabhudesai
24 August 2000
Goa has a good news for industries willing to come down and avail the income tax and sales tax holiday. The tourist state is expected to have excess power to sell, possibly from the next month.
Development in the industrially backward state had literally come to a grinding halt for over two years now due to the court ban on releasing new power connections. The court had no option since the greedy politicians here had allowed power guzzlers, at the cost of load shedding in domestic and industrial sector.
"We will shortly approach the high court with a plea to lift the ban totally", informs power minister Digambar Kamat. The court, in December last year and May this year, had released aruound 24 MW of power in instalments after the situation improved a bit.
Goa, which does not generate power of its own, is allotted total 400 MW of power from the western and southern grids of the National Thermal Power Corporation. But it could not draw more than 190 MW all these years due to lack of wheeling capacity.
Among this, Goa could wheel only 120 MW from the western grid, which has actually allotted 300 MW for the state. Similarly, in spite of having allotment of 100 MW from the southern region, Goa could wheel only 70 MW all these years.
After going for private power generation unnecessarily in between by setting up a 50 MW mini private power plant, the state has now finally decided to increase its wheeling capacity by installing two transformers at its two sub-stations – 100 MW in Sheldem and 50 MW in Ponda.
"This would help us in drawing total 100 from the south and 100 MW more from the west, increasing our total power availability to 320 MW", says R A Ghali, the chief electrical engineer. He plans to commission both the transformers by the month end.
With direct monitoring by the high court, the state had released 24 MW of power since December last year, while only 8 MW is pending on the waiting list, most of which falls under HT category. Even after releasing this power, the state is expected to have at least 82 MW of additional power to sell.
Though it costs four times more than the state power, the Reliance Salgaoncar Power Company Ltd also sells 40 MW of its power to the state electricity department, which increases total power availability to 360 MW.
"The power crisis would however actually be solved only after the 400 KV transmission system from Kolhapur to Mapusa is commissioned, hopefully by 2003. The Rs 182 crore project has been named after late P R Kumaramangalam, who as a power minister laid its foundation stone on 8 August.
"We can then ask for more allotment from the NTPC since our wheeling capacity would rise to 1000 MW", says Ghali. The state has thus decided not to go for private power generation but depend more on the NTPC power to meet its requirement for the decades to come.
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