Complete all ongoing electricity generation, transmission & distribution projects in time: CS

PIONEER NEWS SERVICE/ Dehradun

 Chief secretary Anand Bardhan has directed the officers associated with the department of Power to ensure that all the ongoing projects of generation, transmission and distribution are completed on time. He gave the order while chairing the meeting of the board of directors at Urja Bhawan, UPCL on Saturday.

 Bardhan said that all the works for providing dependable and cheap electricity to consumers should be implemented properly. He directed that a technical member should be appointed in the board of directors for better clarification and study of technical points of different projects. In the board meeting, the CS directed that the tariff order cleared by Uttarakhand Electricity Regulatory Commission (UERC) should be tabled. He said that the information about increased authorisation capital of the companies should be shared with the government. The CS directed the officers to stabilise the enterprise resource plan (ERP) till September 2025.

He said that the remote villages located in the border districts which till now are covered with solar power should also be covered with grid based electricity supply. 

 It was decided in the meeting that in order to improve the voltage quality more than 76,000 capacitor banks will be connected with the transformers in all parts of the State. The proposal in this regard was endorsed by the board of directors.

 The board also approved the plan of UPCL to set up a 100 MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in its meeting. The system will help in the fusion of renewable energy in Uttarakhand.

The CS directed that in depth study and comparison of competitive interest rates of different financial institutions should be done in order to get the money required for the BESS project at low interest rates.

In the meeting the UPCL listed its achievements and claimed that the revenue collection of the corporation has increased continuously in the last three years. The electricity consumer ranking has improved and the aggregate technical and commercial losses have decreased in the last three years.

The meeting was attended by principal secretary R Meenakshi Sundaram, Finance secretary Dilip Jawalkar, board members BP Pandey, Parag Gupta, UPCL managing director Anil Kumar, Power Transmission Corporation of Uttarakhand Limited (PTCUL) MD PC Dhyani and UJVNL MD Sandeep Singhal.