Golden days are here again for PSPCL ; records a profit after gap of 5 years: A. Venu Prasad
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in
CMD PSPCL A.Venu Prasad disclosed that Punjab State Power Corporation Limited has earned a profit of Rs. 1446 crores for the year 2020-21 against the loss of Rs. 1158 crores in the year 2019-20. He disclosed that annual accounts of PSPCL for the year 2020-21 were approved today in a meeting of Board of all directors PSPCL including Anurag Aggarwal, ACS (Power)Punjab Government, K.A.P. Sinha, Principal Secretary (Finance ) were also present.
CMD, PSPCL hoped that savings on financial side and improvements in operations side have their ultimate impact during tariff fixation and PSPCL would keep on serving the electricity consumers with more passion in future and keep on providing quality power supply in the state.
While sharing deatils, CMD disclosed that the main reasons of profit mainly include reduction in finance cost of Rs. 1306 Cr due to UDAY Scheme, increase in carrying cost of Rs. 577 Cr for delayed payment of subsidy, increase in grant by Rs. 570 cr on account of loss funding of previous years and increase in delayed payment surcharge of Rs. 156 cr from consumers.
CMD added that on the financial side, total borrowing of the PSPCL has decreased by 4% over previous years and finance cost has also reduced significantly due to restructuring of loans. He also added that PSPCL was able to earn rebate of around Rs.150 Crores during FY 2020-21 against payments towards power purchase, by effectively & efficiently handling its working capital funds, by adopting various intensive funds management techniques.
He further revealed that transmission & distribution losses were reduced to 14.46% as compared to previous year figure of 14.87%. He said that in order to continue to achieve higher efficiencies, PSPCL has procured 96000 smart meters and has already installed more than 13000 meters at load intensive domestic, commercial & industrial premises at Mohali, Ludhiana, Zirakpur, Jalandhar and Patiala cities by carrying out load studies. He said that with the help of these technological advanced smart meters, the consumers have got a very unique feature of viewing the meter data through PSPCL app in their mobile phones and allowing consumers to keep a regular monitoring & self-control over consumption of electricity. He said that in order to further control the expenditure on power bills by the citizens, smart meters may also be used as prepayment meters in future. This new technology will also bring the differences due to wrong/disputed/erroneous readings to zero and be a major step towards ease of doing, due to automation of meter reading process. This measure will unquestionably be going to improve the operational competence of the corporation by further reduction of T&D losses significantly.
He said thatPSPCL expediently released (even during toughest times of pandemic) 3.20 Lakh new connections with load addition of 605 MW during the FY 2020-21. Further, 329 new industrial large supply connections with total load addition of 276 MW were also released during the period.
A.Venu Prasad said that PSPCL supplied 49799 Mus during FY 2020-21, which were 1352 Mus more than the previous year. Mr. Prasad said that PSPCL had remained highly alert during the whole year for availing power through best possible sources at best rates to provide uninterrupted supply to the citizens of the state. PSPCL has ensured to capture every opportunity to avail the power at lower rates through exchanges in day ahead market (DAM), real time market (RTM) & bidding etc. Cheaper power was even used to replace power of other sources with higher costs. In the process, PSPCL procured around 724 Mus at Rs. 2.76/kwh. Due to all such efficacious improvements, per unit power purchase cost has also decreased by 6.38% during the period.
Applauding the continuous support of the Punjab Government towards power sector, A.Venu Prasad said that Punjab Government had released a huge subsidy of Rs. 9657 crores during the period, covering important sectors like agriculture, industry, and the weaker sections of the society. Giving break-up of the same, CMD told the Punjab government has provided subsidy of Rs. 6057 crores towards its commitment of free power to agriculture sector, Rs. 1990 crores towards keeping the per unit energy rate to Rs. 5 for industrial sector, and Rs. 1610 crores towards full bill waiver (400 units for a bill of 2 months) of eligible SC, BC and BPL families.
September 15,2021
