Nepal is totally load-shedding free

Kathmandu, May 13

Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has declared the nation as load-shedding free from Monday. The three hours of load-shedding that the industries had to bear with has also been removed from today which has made the country totally load-shedding free, said Kul Man Ghising, managing director of NEA.

NEA will be able to sustain the supply during winter as well as the 456-megawatt Upper Tamakoshi Hydroelectric Project will start generating power by the end of this year and some private sector projects will also be completed, as per Ghising.

Till date, the power utility had been cutting electricity to industries for three hours a day during peak time to meet the domestic demand from available electricity supply.

NEA had announced elimination of load-shedding for domestic users from mid-April 2017. The power utility has taken various measures to optimise available electricity by controlling leakage and encouraging the use of LED lights, among others.

Currently, the peak time load is around 1,300 megawatts whereas supply stands at around 1,073 megawatts. Electricity generation from snow-fed rivers falls to one-third of the installed capacity of run-of-the-river hydropower plants and most of the hydroelectricity projects are of this type.

Elimination of load-shedding in the industrial sector is expected to boost industrial output. Capacity utilisation of Nepali industries picked up in the last fiscal as electricity supply to industrial units improved.

As per NEA, 80 per cent of the total electricity supplied is being consumed by domestic users and the industry sector consumes only eight per cent of the total electricity.