CHENNAI, July 31: Tangedco submitted a petition to the Tamil Nadu Electricity Regulatory Commission (TNERC) to correct additional charges on customers buying or selling power through an open access scheme, opening a Pandora’s Box with a variety of organizations restricting the case as they are now charging additional charges for using the transmitting power facility.
Open access is a mechanism in which private power producers can directly sell electricity to any private company using Tangedco’s distribution network by charging the discom a surcharge. The program was in vogue 10 years ago but was scrapped when power shortages arose in the state in 2009 and reintroduced two years ago when the discom felt it was power surplus.
Tangedco has requested a unit of 1.42 as an extra fee from buyers of open access. About 3,350 people who use open access spend more than 16,000 million units per year and Tangedco thinks that offering extra charges will gain some salary for the ridden utility duty. According to its submission, Tangedco ‘s reasoning is that it needs to pay private players some 2.3 / unit fixed expenses, although it gets just 88 paise / unit as an overcharge from open access customers. The discom loses 1.42 for each unit sold under the open access system. This was a faulty system, causing clear loss of cash from the very first moment.
A senior Tangedco official said- “Had Tangedco commissioned all of its planned thermal units as scheduled, it did not need to sign medium-term contracts with private power generators, offering them fixed costs. The problem is that we don’t commission new projects as set out in our strategy. As a result, we sign contracts with private power suppliers to buy electricity, but don’t make full use of it. They sell electricity to private companies and we end up paying fixed charges for that.
The under-recovery for Tangedco was Rs 2,383 crore in the year 2018-19, when 16,784 million units were devoured via an open access program. “It is important to point out that during the years 2017-18 and 2018-19 Tangedco needed to withdraw age proportionate to 16,678 MUs and 16,784 MUs separately and similarly implemented a cap of approximately 2000 MW on a standard premise that remained abandoned during those years,” Tangedco ‘s boss said.
But businesses that use open access reject the provision of the discom before TNERC. “The 2003 Electricity Act specifically specified that cross-subsidies would be abolished in five years ‘ time. Now the discom wants to add an extra surcharge over and above the cross subsidy. That will ruin the idea of open access, “a senior official at the organization said using open access. The sole goal of Tangedco is to destroy all competitors so that it remains the sole supplier of electricity in the state, said K Kasturirangaiyan, president of the Indian Wind Power Association, opposing the demand for additional surcharge by the discom.
