CHENNAI: Electricity and law minister CTR Nirmal Kumar said that people should not obstruct TNPDCL personnel involved in rectifying power cuts. Speaking to the media after chief minister C Joseph Vijay’s maiden inspection at TNEB headquarters on Anna Salai on Wednesday, the minister said, “People’s frustration over interruptions in power supply is palpable, but they should not lay siege to substations and disturb when field personnel were busy fixing the problem.”The minister’s response was to a query on TNPDCL officers not being available over phone to report power cuts. Nirmal Kumar also blamed the previous DMK govt for not carrying out maintenance work in time ahead of summer for interruptions reported across Tamil Nadu. “Citing elections, the previous govt postponed the maintenance of TNPDCL distribution assets like substations and transformers, which eventually could not withstand the surging load and failed, leading to power cuts,” the minister said.To address the power cuts, the minister said that the field officers have been permitted to engage upto 18,000 workers on contract basis and added that that upto 6,000 transformers would be installed and upgraded in one year to withstand the growing power load. “Tamil Nadu also needs 600 substations to strengthen the distribution infrastructure, which will be set up in phased manner over the next five years,” he said. The minister also said that a detailed plan has been chalked out to meet the power demand during next summer and the same was appraised to the chief minister during inspection.The minister also mentioned that an AI-enabled grievance redressal mechanism to aide electricity consumers is in the offing and added that that State is set to release the battery energy storage policy in October, so that excess and wind and solar power can be stored and used to meet the peak power demands.
