sparks are expected to fly as electricity watchdog MERC will hear versions of all stakeholders today
A Malad family during the power outage. Pic/Anurag Ahire
A virtual hearing is to be conducted by the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC) on Wednesday regarding last week's power outage and sparks are expected to fly. The MERC wants to know what went wrong on October 12 and has summoned all stakeholders, including private utilities, one of which has been blamed by the state-owned company for delayed response in mitigating the unprecedented failure.'
The MERC seems interested in finding out the actual reasons and stopping the blame game.
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Two independent enquiries have already been instituted since the failure.
The state government has asked its experts to probe, while the Union Power Ministry sent its team last week. State electricity transmission company MahaTransco has blamed Tata Power for delayed response in restoring generation.
Families emerged out of their homes to escape the heat amid no power. Pic/Nimesh Dave
Apart from technical and human error, energy minister Dr Nitin Raut hasn't denied the possibility of sabotage, a charge that rocked the power and political sector.
Sources said the state companies — for transmission and distribution — will not take things lying down and impressed upon the commission that they alone shouldn't be held responsible for failing Mumbai since their stake is much less than the private (Tata and Adani) and municipal (BEST) players.
The Commission has received a preliminary report from the Maharashtra State Load Dispatch Center (MSLDC) regarding the pre-outage conditions, the sequence of events, affected load, and status of recovery.
Tata Power, Adani Power and state utilities have also submitted their preliminary findings. However, more and in-depth details will be discussed on
Wednesday.
Islanding system
MERC has specifically asked the companies responsible to let it know whether the city's islanding system operated as envisaged.
"Is it relevant in the changed scenario?" it has asked the companies which are partners in islanding which came into being a quarter of a century ago and saved the city from blackouts.
Tata Power had promoted and implemented it. It was updated by taking partners in other city power utilities.
The most debated limited capacity of carrying power from outside Mumbai will also be discussed in the hearing.
MERC had played a big role in suggesting corrective measures after the 2010 grid failure.
It wants to know what action was taken to avoid recurrences. It has asked all generation, distribution and transmission companies to furnish their individual performance and responses during the October 12 crisis which left people in Mumbai and parts of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) without power for many hours. In some areas, the outage lasted overnight.
2
No. of independent entities probing the incident
12
Day this month the power outage took place
Maharashtra energy minister raps officers
A day ahead of the MERC hearing, Dr Nitin Raut took officers of the three state companies to task and threatened action against the erring. He held the meeting at the company's Bandra HQ on Tuesday. A technical committee is expected to give him a report by this weekend.
"Is the islanding system built only for one private company? The population has increased and so has consumption of power in the past so many years. What changes have been made to the system in accordance with changing patterns? Have the government [energy department included] not studied similar islanding systems in other international cities?" he asked and demanded that he be given a report to his queries by Saturday.
"You fix responsibility or else I will do it and take punitive action," said Raut, telling the State Load Dispatch Centre to come clean over Tata Power's allegation that it wasn't instructed about islanding in advance. "I want to see the officer's phone where he sent the text message to Tata Power," he asked further.
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