Energy Secretary B. Sreedhar on Saturday said the DISCOMs were resorting to Emergency Load Relief (ELR) only after exhausting all the options available for procuring power, and insisted that it was a temporary phenomenon, which the consumers had to bear with lest grid safety should suffer.
He claimed that the ELR was necessitated by a significant increase in consumption to an average of 235 Million Units (MU) per day in March-April compared to 200 MU to 210 MU and 160 to 170 MU in the corresponding periods of 2021 and 2020. The consumption in 2020 was low due to the COVID lockdown and it went up the next year (2021) because of the revival of at least 50% of the industrial activity.
Post-COVID, i.e. in March-April this year, there was a full-scale recovery of the industrial sector, so much that even sick units came back into production owing to impressive growth in demand.
