CHENNAI: Tangedco at 7pm on Monday evacuated 5,079MW of wind power, a new record in wind power evacuation in Tamil Nadu and India. It was a two hour sustained supply of over 5,000MW on Monday. For nearly 3 hours, Tangedco put 3 thermal units with a total capacity of 1,020MW on stand-by mode and also advised other power sources to operate at 50% of their capacity. “We were thrilled on Monday evening when the wind power generation started increasing. Immediately, we put private thermal units on standby and evacuated wind power to the maximum,” a senior Tangedco official told TOI.
The previous record in Tangedco’s wind energy evacuation was 4,600MW. “On May 31 this year, we evacuated 4,600MW of wind power; the total wind power consumption on that day was around 99.46 million units,” said the official. The total power demand for Tamil Nadu on Monday evening was less than 14,000MW, thus more than one-third of the total power supply in Tamil Nadu was met by wind energy. This year the average wind power evacuation in Tamil Nadu has increased to nearly 3,500MW per day. Wind power evacuation has been better in recent years due to better forecast. Compared to a few previous years, wind power generation increased by nearly 1,000MW this year. In 2016, wind power generation picked up in April when the total evacuation touched 1,848MW. But in 2015, due to heavy rain in May, the wind power evacuation touched only 22MW in mid May.
“The cost of wind power is lower compared to other power sources and due to better wind power evacuation, we save several crores on purchase of power,” said the official. Tangedco is ready to sell wind power to other states. “It is only to make wind power available for other states that we sought a separate corridor from Union power minister Piyush Goyal during his recent visit to Chennai,” said the official.
Source:TOI
