Sweltering summer lays bare chinks in Kerala’s power system Premium

2024’s unusually warm summer has left Kerala with no alternative but to confront a problem that it has been ignoring for the past few decades. Some districts are battling heatwaves, which has laid bare the chinks in the State’s power system.

The unusually warm summer this year has left Kerala with no alternative but to confront a problem that it has been ignoring for the past few decades. Some districts are battling heatwaves, which has laid bare the chinks in the State’s power system.

It is well known that Kerala depends on electricity imports for much of its daily electricity requirement. It has become routine practice for the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB), the State-run power utility, to stave off power restrictions during summer by making advance power purchase deals and entering into swap arrangements with power generators and utilities elsewhere in the country.

However, this year, KSEB projections were upended after temperatures drove up electricity usage to an unprecedented degree. On several days, the year-on-year increase has been in the range of 15 to 20 million units (mu). Electricity consumption rose by 12.79% and 15.62% in March and April, respectively, compared to the same months in 2023. The demand has especially surged in the late evening hours thanks to greater dependence on air-conditioners and the practice of charging e-vehicles during that time. The spike in peak power demand (evening hours) in April on a year-on-year basis was 12.38%. Meeting this demand has proven to be an uphill task.

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Amid all this, people stormed the KSEB section offices following power outages. All this has not made things easy for the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front government. A public-sector behemoth with more than 30,000 staff, the KSEB has been accused of being apathetic to complaints and of resorting to unofficial load shedding.

In early May, the Kerala government recommended self-regulation and ruled out the imposition of State-wide power curbs and cyclical load shedding. It directed industries and commercial establishments to keep usage at a minimum between 10 p.m. and midnight. It advised domestic consumers, who constitute the majority of the 1.37 crore-strong KSEB consumers, to conserve electricity and shift high-end electricity use to off-peak hours.

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