Citing loss, Tangedco wants Open Access consumers to pay additional surcharge

State electricity utility says it suffered a loss of ₹2,383 crore due to under-recovery

The Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (Tangedco) has filed a petition with the Tamil Nadu Electricity Regulatory Commission (TNERC) to fix additional surcharge for consumers purchasing power through Open Access (OA) system. The petition is bound to add to the burden of the industrial consumers using the system.

The petition filed by Tangedco on Thursday claims that since the Open Access system of purchasing power was implemented in the State, a total of 3,350 consumers were using the scheme till 2018-19. In the financial year 2019-20, the Tangedco granted OA approval for 4,000 consumers.

While Tangedco purchases power from various sources through power purchase agreements (PPAs) of Central generating stations and private power producers, the electricity department is also executing several thermal and solar projects to the tune of 6,700 mega watt (MW) to meet the future demands of consumers.

Open Access is the system where a private industry ties up with a power producer for supplying power through the Tangedco distribution network by paying a surcharge.

However, the Open Access consumers are not availing power supply from the Tangedco directly leading to several power plants remaining idle and in some cases being shut down.

Moreover, the Tangedco has been incurring heavy expenditure owing to the payment fixed cost to the power generators whether power was purchased or not through PPAs.

In the petition, Tangedco states that the demand charges paid by OA consumers to Tangedco was only ₹0.88 per unit while the total fixed cost paid by the State electricity utility was ₹2.30 per unit resulting in the under-recovery of ₹1.42 per unit. The under-recovery is for the financial year 2018-19. The petition states Tangedco has suffered loss of ₹2,383 crore through supply of 16,784 million units in 2018-19.

Citing the provision of TNERC (Grid Connectivity and Intra-State Open Access) Regulations of 2014, Tangedco wants the commission to fix ‘additional surcharge’ of ₹1.42 per unit for the Open Access consumers. The petition also prays for fixing cross subsidy surcharge on the OA consumers.