The demand-supply gap for power in Maharashtra started increasing around 2005. Lack of rational capacity addition planning was the primary reason for this. Though load shedding has been a routine affair in rural areas, during this period industrial and urban areas started facing load shedding of 2 – 4 hours per day. Along with the discomfort and inconvenience caused to residential consumers, load shedding became a major financial issue for industries. To manage this demand – supply gap, Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC) issued directives to implement what came to be called as ‘load shedding protocol’. As per these protocols, load shedding differed from division to division and was based on distribution losses, collection efficiency as well as consumer mix of the division. This resulted in load shedding of over 10 hrs in agriculture dominated divisions with high losses and about 2 –4 hrs in urban, industrial areas with low losses.

With this background, on 25th October 2005 the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII Western Region) came up with a proposal on the utilization of the dormant liquid fuel based captive power capacity available with a few large industries in Pune, for mitigating load shedding in the Pune Urban Circle of MSEDCL. After due regulatory process and public hearings the proposal was accepted. This led to significant reduction in load shedding for Pune city. The initial model has evolved considerably over last three years and was also expanded to other urban / industrial areas such as Thane, Navi Mumbai and Vashi. This brief article, which appeared in January 2009 issue of the Powerline magznie, shares the experience of this approach for mitigating load shedding in urban, industrial areas and key lessons from this process.