Shillong, May 6: A fact-finding team of Opposition political parties has projected that Meghalaya would require a power generation capacity of 1,000MW by 2020 to ensure a 24x7 supply.

The team consisted of representatives from the United Democratic Party, National People's Party, Hill State People's Democratic Party, Khun Hynniewtrep National Awakening Movement and the BJP.

The team, which was formed to probe into the reasons responsible for the poor performance of the power sector in Meghalaya, was led by UDP legislator Jemino Mawthoh as its chairman.

Formed last year, the team had interacted with various government officials and had visited various hydroelectric project sites of the Meghalaya Energy Corporation Limited (MeECL), generating stations and some important grid substations to gather firsthand information on the state's power scenario.

In its report, the team stated that the current generation capacity of the MeECL is around 317MW while the current peak demand within the state is 500MW.

"With a load growth of 20 per cent per annum, the state will need to have a generation capacity of 1,000MW by 2020 in order to have a reliable 24x7 supply. This will also save MeECL from purchasing po-wer from outside the state, wh-ich it cannot afford because of bankruptcy," the report said.

In the coming three years, the capacity addition would be from the ongoing Umtru Hydro Electricity Project of 40MW and the Ganol Hydro Project of 25MW, which would increase the generation capacity to 382MW.

Acknowledging that the demand for power has substantially risen because of the consumption pattern with increase in domestic, commercial and industrial consumers, the team felt that the government has "miserably failed" to address the crucial issue from a proper perspective.

The team said the "grim situation" of the power sector is due to high transmission and distribution losses, which stand at 32 per cent, poor cash flow and presence of unproductive skilled and unskilled workers causing under-collection, which has led to no revenue generation from a significant amount of power supplied.The other reasons include the government's failure to appoint a full-time chairman-cum-managing director and poor procurement planning resulting in last minute purchases of power to supply end consumers from the more expensive spot market.

The team also reported that the share of power purchase cost to total cost rose from 56 per cent in 2003 to 70 per cent in 2012 due to increase in generation tariff awarded by the Central Electric Regulatory Commission to the central generating stations like Neepco, NHPC, NTPC and others coupled with load growth within the state.

Stating that the government had allotted various hydro electricity projects in the range of 1,000MW to 1,5000MW to Independent Power Producers around eight years ago, not a single project has taken off. "It also appears that the IPPs have not made any preliminary work to overcome the ever increasing demand, which has become appropriate for the team to be suspicious of the true intentions of the state government," the team stated.

Therefore, the team suggested that the government could look towards the MeECL for implementation of the projects by cancelling the allotted projects to IPPs, which are unable to execute them since 2007. It argued that MeECL has attained the size to execute these projects.