If you think it was just a technical glitch causing the power failure of Unit number 5 of TPC that led to Tuesday night's rare outage, think again. It is also the ongoing war between the two power utilities, Tata Power and Brihanmunbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST), which is causing much suffering to Mumbai's hapless consumers.
Even as power was restored late on Tuesday night/early on Wednesday morning in Mumbai homes, new details emerged showing that consumers were literally caught between BEST Undertaking and Tata Power.
BEST, which is responsible for power distribution across the island city, issued a statement late on Tuesday night accusing Tata Power of a misleading statement over shut units and trying to poach its customers.
In a hard hitting statement, the utility provider pointed out that it was not ready to buy power at an exaggerated cost of Rs 13 per unit from Tata Power's unit number 6. "As BEST had made adequate arrangements of power procurement and also paying standby charges and transmission charges, furthermore procuring costly power of unit 6 (i.e. at Rs 13 per unit) would further burden the BEST consumers," it said.
"Since BEST had sufficient alternate power arrangements, it had informed non requirement of Unit 6 costly power. As such M/s TPC’s statement (regarding the cold standby of Unit 6 with the consent of the procurer) is totally false and misleading since the power to operate the grid elements, including Unit 6, is not strictly under the purview of BEST," the statement read.
The utility provider went on to make a further grave charge in the statement. "The lackadaisical approach of M/s TPC added with the ulterior motives of poaching BEST's consumers could be the scheme underneath the current fiasco," the statement issued by the BEST spokesperson read.
While Tata Power holds the licence for transmission in Mumbai, and has select high end consumers in the island city apart from BEST, the latter has a distribution network across the city. BEST is largely dependent on supply from Tata Power and has entered into a power purchase agreement with them.
Sources told dna that BEST was unhappy with Tata Power for not honouring the PPA in a time of crisis. "It is TPC's responsibility to supply 555 MW power to BEST as per the agreement. They couldn't have forced BEST to procure power at costlier rates from their own unit," sources pointed out.
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