Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission, with jurisdiction over Andhra Pradesh and Telangana for the next two years, has issued an advisory to both the new state governments.
The advisory says that the state governments must promote differential tariffs across discoms to enhance competition, measure consumption in the agricultural sector, manage consumption on government and agricultural sectors, promote non-conventional energy and improve project implementation.
The commission has urged the state governments to review the existing tariff policy and consider adopting individual tariff regimes for each discom as early as possible.
This will also mean that consumers for less efficient discoms will end up paying a higher tariff as “inefficiency” will affect the tariff.
The Regulatory Commission has also asked both state governments to accurately measures AT and C (Aggregate Technical and Commercial) losses as it has been a major challenge for the APERC in deciding tariff right from the inception.
Meanwhile, in a separate advisory, APERC stressed that certain issues need clarification to allow division of the sector between AP and Telangana seamlessly.
Issues including allocation of power generated to the four discoms, status of APERC, sharing of power generated by Central Stations, purchase of excess power, ownership of hydro power projects and treatment of hydro power projects were raised.
The APERC pointed out that although the AP Reorganisation Act has specified that the existing Power Purchase Agreement with discoms will continue, none of the PPAs signed by the generators allocated power to individual discoms.
Power is allocated to Genco, and hence, the power allocated to each discom is nowhere mentioned in the respective PPA. The inter-state allocations as well as the allocations on transfer of two districts of Anantapur and Kurnool from Apcpdcl to Apspdcl need to be revisited.
“Designating a successor in the interest of APERC is extremely important in view of the pending litigations in the Supreme Court where APERC has filed appeals on decisions by a lower court. Such appeals may abate if the successor of APERC is not clearly identified in the Act, causing unintended and significant losses to stakeholders,” the advisory says.
