Bescom project promises to restore power, reduce outages

Bescom’s new Distribution Automation System (DAS) aims to speed up restoration of power and reduce the number of people affected by outages in the City. The project is in its implementation stage and would be complete in a year, said Energy Minister D K Shivakumar.

The Energy Minister further said that the City would benefit from the project, which is estimated to cost Rs 563 crore. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is said to be providing financial assistance for the project.

The basic idea behind this initiative is to help avoiding loss of time for fault location. When power has to be restored manually without automation, if a section of the feeder suffers glitches, by the time the customer reports power outage, and the personnel travel till the place for manual switching to restore power for people on the healthy section of the feeder, it takes about 45 minutes to 75 minutes.

By the time the repair is done, it will take about 4 hours to get the feeder back to normal.

With automation, the healthy section of the feeder will be automatically isolated from the affected one. Within a minute or two, power will be restored to customers on the healthy section of the feeder. The repair time of the faulty section will also be much lesser as the person does not have to manually spend time to identify the problem area.

A centralised automation system has been proposed for this purpose at HSR Layout.

Reward for complaints

A cash award of Rs 2,000 will be given to any one who reports about illegal pump sets, said DK Shivakumar, who was speaking to mediapersons here on Friday ahead of an inspection at the Bescom corporate office.

According to the minister, farmers are being given an opportunity to regularise the pump sets by paying fees. Saying that no deadline has been fixed for the regularisation, he added that the government has decided to chip in 75 per cent of the cost if farmers agree to regularise pump sets.

The government also owes Bescom nearly Rs 10,000 crore for all the power subsidies granted. In this regard, DK Shivakumar said that he had met the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister as the department owed about Rs 3,000 crore. The matter will be brought before the Cabinet, he added.

About removal of transformers from footpaths, the minister said a practical approach had to be worked out as the other alternative would be to erect it in buildings and no one would agree to have a transformer on their premises.