Power Demand Peaks At 89.4 GW, Causes Tripping Incidents Across Northern States

Multiple tripping incidents occurred in the northern part of India on Monday after power demand surged to 89.4 gigawatts, creating a supply gap of 16.5 gigawatts, according to a Northern Regional Load Despatch Centre report. The affected states included Haryana, Delhi, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jammu and Kashmir.

NRLDC, part of the National Load Despatch Centre under the Union Ministry of Power, oversees electricity scheduling and dispatch over inter-regional links.

"At 13:53 hours, northern region demand experienced a reduction in load of the order of 16.5 GW," NRLDC said. "The incident occurred immediately after the tripping of both bipoles of +/-800 kV HVDC Champa (WR) - Kurukshetra (NR) which was carrying 4,500 MW from the western region to the northern region. After tripping of the HVDC link, low voltages were observed across the northern region and the above load reduction occurred."

A partial outage of the 765/400kV Aligarh (PGCIL) station occurred due to the reported tripping of five 765 kV lines. Prior to the event, the net import of NR was 15,500 MW and a demand of 89,410 MW was being catered.

Loads were gradually restored considering low voltages and high loading on 765 KV Agra-Gwalior lines. System load was restored to near normal level by 2:30 p.m. All the transmission elements which tripped were restored by 4:00 p.m.

In the Northern Region hydro generating units tripped at Bhakra, Karcham, Sainj, Ranjit Sagar Dam (Total-1,237 MW). Thermal generating units tripped at Lalitpur, Rajwest, Unchahar, Panipat (Total-1,250 MW).

Reacting to the incident, AIPEF Chairman Shailendra Dubey urged the government to declare the heatwave a natural calamity and take immediate measures. In a letter, AIPEF suggested changing office hours to 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., closing commercial establishments by 7:00 p.m., and imposing peak load restrictions on the industry to tackle the situation.

(Text inputs from PTI.)