Discom counsel on vacation, outages hearing deferred

 The Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission has extended the date of hearing of the matter regarding unscheduled massive outages on July 10 as a counsel of Reliance Infra backed discom BSES is not available.

The BSES has reportedly told DERC that its counsel is not available as he is on a foreign trip.

On June 18, the DERC issued notices to three discoms—BSES Rajdhani Power Limited, BSES Yamuna Power Limited and Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited seeking reply on the massive unscheduled outages throughout the month following the massive thunderstorm of May 30.

At the time of issuing notices, the commission had fixed the date of hearing of the matter on June 26, but a day before the hearing, the commission officials bowed down to a silly request of BSES and deferred the hearing to July 10.

“We received a call from the DERC office this morning. The officials informed us that the date of hearing of the unscheduled outages has been deferred due to unavailability of BSES’ counsel,” said a source.

In its notice, the commission asked the discoms to elaborate reasons behind unscheduled outages. A similar notice was also issued to Delhi Transco Limited. The discom and Transco were blaming each other for unscheduled outages.

Earlier, during the public meeting of DERC, representatives from various resident welfare associations (RWAs) and NGOs accused the commission for working for the discoms.
The BSES officials refused to comment. “The date of hearing has been postponed to July 10. We don’t want to comment on this issue. We will appear in the hearing,” said a BSES official who refused to be quoted.

Monsoon preparations

Discoms are gearing up for monsoon by taking preventive maintenance work and issuing  guidelines for customers to ensure incident-free rainy season.

“To minimise the incidents of moisture-related breakdowns, BSES Rajdhani Power Limited and BSES Yamuna Power Limited are taking  measures to minimise the accumulation of moisture in the grids and panels in transformers,” a BSES spokesperson said.

Discoms have asked people to stay away from electrical instalations like electricity poles, sub-stations and transformers.