A generator in Patna. Telegraph picture

Patna, Feb. 9: Power shortage continued to plague the state for the fifth consecutive day today, as it received less than half of its electricity allocation from the Centre. The power supply from the Kahalgaon-based thermal power plant did not show any sign of improvement either.

The state has been reeling under power crisis since Friday when the Centre abruptly decided to slash its allocation by 70MW. The derailment on NTPC’s merry go round (MGR) track on Sunday led to further crisis because of less supply of coal to the seven units of the Kahalgaon-based National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) plant and subsequent low power production.

“The state received 791MW of electricity from the central sector which was later raised to around 900 MW,” Bihar State Electricity Board (BSEB) spokesman H.R. Pandey told The Telegraph.

The state has a fixed share of electricity from each of the seven units at Kahalgaon. If power generation at any of the units stops, it has an adverse impact on the state’s power requirement, a BSEB official said.

Out of 2,340MW of generation, Bihar was supposed to get around 423MW from both stage I and II units of Kahalgaon. However, at present, the state is receiving just 74MW of electricity.

Unit 1 (210MW) and unit 5 (500MW) are running at a low capacity because of reduced coal supply, the NTPC official said, adding these two plants were getting just two rakes of coal a day.

Chance of an improvement in power situation was unlikely in the next few days. If the MGR track is repaired as per schedule on Saturday, the situation may improve.

Earlier, the NTPC Kahalgaon general manager had expressed hope that all its units would start generation by Thursday (February 10) but till date the restoration work has not been completed. It would take at least two more days for the work to be completed.

“NTPC requires 42,000 to 45,000 metric tones of coal per day to run all its seven plants at full capacity,” he said.

The state received around 900MW of electricity from the central sector besides 60MW from its own Barauni thermal power plant today. Effectively, the BSEB had to manage with the 960MW of power to meet the requirement of the entire state.

The power crunch could be felt from the fact that the two major districts of north Bihar — Muzaffarpur and Gaya — received 15MW-25MW and 5MW-20MW of power, respectively.