‘Outages due to poor distribution network of pvt power discoms’

Power Minister Satyendar Jain, who is miffed over poor performance of BSES discoms, will meet the company’s Chairman Lalit Jalan here on Wednesday, days after his missive to Anil Ambani, the Chairperson of Reliance-ADAG.

Jain told reporters that the city was facing outages due to “local faults” and not due to a shortage of power.

“We can even sell power to states across the country in view of the surplus availability of around 1,500 to 2,000 MW here and the prevailing costly power purchase agreements with the private distribution companies. We have written to all,” Jain said.

The national Capital had on May 20 recorded its peak power demand of 6,188 MW. It had crippled the power infrastructure and led to outages in many parts of the city, which officials said was due to the inability of the distribution network to handle “overload”.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had recently lashed out at the discoms over power cuts, while Jain had shot off a letter to Ambani highlighting “atrocious” performance of the discoms. Reliance ADAG-owned BSES entities BRPL (BSES Rajdhani Power Limited) and BYPL (BSES Yamuna Power Limited) supply electricity to around 12 lakh and 16 lakh customers, respectively. The city’s power sector was privatised in 2002.