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Arunachal to get world's biggest power project

Nitin Gogoi in Guwahati

Survey work on the Dihang and Subansiri hydro-electrical power project -- believed to be the world's biggest with a capacity to generate 21,000 mega-watts of electricity -- in the upper reaches of Arunachal Pradesh bordering China has commenced, India's Power Minister PR Kumaramangalam announced here on Thursday.

The US $ 200 billion project is expected to generate electricity from 2008. Once this project goes on stream, power shortage in the north-east will be a thing of the past.

Indeed, the north-east will be able to export power to neighbouring countries like Myanmar and Bangladesh, the power minister said.

Work on a detailed project report has already commenced, he added.

Kumaramangalam, along with his minister for state, Jayawanti Mehta, was in Guwahati to participate in the fourth meeting of the north-east power ministers.

The initial work on the Dihang-Subansiri project (both rivers originate in China before entering India in Arunachal Pradesh and joining up with the Brahmaputra) will be done by the Shillong-based public sector North East Electric Power Corporation. NEEPCO has at least three decades of experience in doing such projects.

At a later stage, a special purpose vehicle may be created to forge a strategic alliance between public and private sector power companies, top officials say.

"The Centre could set up a separate authority to be called the Brahmaputra Hydro Development Corporation to run the massive project," a top official told this correspondent.

The latest move by the power ministry to give expeditious clearance to the Dihang Subansiri project comes in the wake of a recent policy decision to concentrate on generating more hydro power. "The share of hydro-power has been continuously declining over the past three decades. Against the ideal hydel-thermal mix of 40:60, the share has gone down from 44 per cent in 1970 to 25 per cent in 1999," a top power ministry official pointed out.

It is in keeping with this concern that the power ministry has begun giving emphasis on hydropower development, he said.

Apart from clearing the Dihang-Subansiri project, several important decisions on new and ongoing projects were taken during the day-long meeting. Smaller power projects in various states across the north-east have been identified. They are: Tuival (Mizoram-210 MW), Kameng (Arunachal Pradesh-600 MW) and Tipaimukh (Manipur-1500 MW).

These are in addition to several ongoing projects like Kopili (Assam) stage II (25 MW); Tuirial (Mizoram-60 MW); Loktak downstream (Manipur-90 MW), Ranganadi (Arunachal Pradesh-405 MW), Doyang (Nagaland -75 MW) and Teesta V (Sikkim-510 MW). When all these projects go on stream by 2006, they would add an additional generating capacity of over 1,000 MW.

Kumaramangalam, however, admitted that just generating more power will not be sufficient. "We need to upgrade our transmission systems to match the additional generation capacity," he said. The minister was only articulating what has been the planners' nightmare for years now.

NEEPCO, for instance, produces more power than required by the seven states. But in the absence of concurrent progress in building compatible transmission lines, it is neither able to feed the remote areas of the region nor evacuate the power outside the north-east.

As NEEPCO's chairman and managing director, PK Katoky, told this correspondent: "At the moment our problem is not lack of power but absence of a proper infrastructure to evacuate the power. While we have been able to keep pace with the rising demands of power requirement, the transmission lines have not been upgraded to the required standards, thereby creating a piquant situation."

The seven states of the north-east require 800 MW of power during the peak period (4 to 10 pm) but during the rest of the day, the power requirement is as low as 250 MW. At the moment, NEEPCO's installed capacity is 625 MW while the state electricity boards chip in with the rest of the 800 MW requirement.

The problem that NEEPCO faces is evacuation of excess power during the off-peak period. Apparently, power produced by NEEPCO requires 220 KV transformers for transmission. But in the entire north-east, the lines connected to 220 kV transformers are at best capable of transmitting only 400 MW of power. Rest of the lines are connected to 132 KV transformers. The result: nearly 400 MW of power that the region is capable of producing, cannot be used.

In this context, Kumaramangalam has advised the Power Grid Corporation -- entrusted with building high power transmission lines -- to speed up its work in the region. It remains to be seen whether it can match the speed with which the region is building additional generating capacity.

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