AMARAVATI: In an interesting development, the electricity utilities have anticipated that the consumption in the agriculture sector will continue to go up during 2022-23.
All three discoms-EPDCL, CPDCL and SPDCL-have projected the growth rate from the agriculture sector in the coming year as ranging between five to 10 per cent.
The SPDCL, which covers most drought hit districts of Rayalaseema, projected that the agriculture consumption will increase by 10 per cent. The EPDCL, which has already implemented the pilot project of implementing smart meters on pumpsets, projected an increase by five per cent. CPDCL, with the lowest number of agriculture pumpsets, has projected an increase by eight per cent.
The projection of steep increase in consumption is significant particularly in the wake of discoms preparing to complete the installation of meters to pumpsets in a couple of months. Power utilities have been contending that fixation of meters will help them prevent power theft and unauthorised tapping for non-agriculture purposes.
"It is too early to come to a conclusion about the results of the meters installation because we do not have factual data of consumption in the past. In fact, the meters are proposed to strengthen the network depending on the demand," observed a senior energy official.
Discoms are hopeful of overcoming all issues including theft and unauthorised tapping once the system switches over to metered calculation. According to EPDCL, 2,276 million units were consumed by the agriculture sector out of the total sale of 21,861 million units during 2020-21. This is around 10.41 per cent of the total sale.
The consumption from the agriculture sector witnessed a slight increase during 2021-22, at 2,658 million units of the total supplied power of 24,486 million units.
"While the agriculture sector consumed around 10.41 per cent of the total supplies during 2020-21, it was around 10.86 per cent during 2021-22," said N Gangadhar, chief general manager of EPDCL in the filings with APERC.
EPDCL, which made around 742 crore from the sale of agriculture power (from the government), put the bill at 867 crore for 2022-23 in anticipation of the increase in consumption. It got around 642.48 crore during 2020-21 from agriculture power sale.
Senior officials said that agriculture consumption calculations could be holistic and factual only from 2023-24 as it would take them at least six to eight months to study consumption patterns to plug leakages.
