Chief Minister criticises Central government’s power policy

Hyderabad: Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy on Friday criticised the Central government’s power policy, calling it disappointing and discouraging.

Participating in the India Power Awards distribution ceremony held here, the CM talked about the need to generate more power by amending the policies.

He said that while Andhra Pradesh used to be a surplus power producer in 1970, the current situation had reversed. The state generated only around 82,000 million units per annum at present, while the demand was much more. He added that lack of proper planning and policy formulation had led to this situation.

Kiran Kumar Reddy said that there were coal reserves of three lakh million tonnes as estimated by the Geological Survey of India. “Unfortunately, we haven’t properly planned and invested in the right technology and exploited these reserves for efficient use. We hardly produced 557 million tonnes of both coking coal and noncoking coal during 2012-13,”he said.

“We encouraged inve stments in gas based power plants and ultimately after huge investments in capacities, we reversed the policies stating that power generation using gas was not a national priority. Our state alone has close to 7,000 MWs installed capacity and hardly one tenth of it is being used today,” he complained.

“Hydel planning and generation is no better. In the name of environmental constraints, reh abilitation problems and intractable water disputes between states, a good number of potential power generation projects using hydel energy has got stuck despite the fact that it is the cheapest and most environment friendly way of producing energy.” he added.

He also said that the Government of India had not paid required attention to solving water disputes, nor had it encouraged investments in this regard.

“Even in case of wind, solar and bio mass, our policies are found to be wanting and investors were not encouraged to invest their money.”