Lalitpur, March 28:

With the aim of minimising the impact of daily power outage, the Patan Industrial Estate (PIE) has arranged an internal load-shedding timetable of its own.

“Instead of daily five hours of load-shedding, industries inside the PIE will close their operations for 12-hours a day in a week. The schedule, which is on a trial phase and took effect from Monday, will help the PIE run the industries without being interrupted by the load-shedding,” said Anand Karki, acting manager, PIE.

The timetable does not provide additional energy, but helps cope with the cut-off. The PIE, which consumes 250,000 units of electricity per month, hopes the system will bring power consumption down to 62,500 units.

As the PIE has its own feeder with three sub-stations and a separate department of electricity inside its site, we can manage the schedule with the permission from Nepal Electricity Authority, said Karki. Sanghai Plastic Industries Private Ltd, which consumes 25 per cent of the electricity distributed in the PIE, will have power cut off every Friday. Rakesh Agrawal, general manager of the industries, said power cut-off had affected production of plastic industries the most.

“Three hours of power cut-off was equivalent to loss of six working hours in our industry,” said Agrawal, adding the cut-off brought wastage and turned away the clients due to untimely delivery of products. The schedule of a day off in a week will hopefully improve the situation, he said.

An official at the System Operation Department said the department has accepted the proposal put forth by the estate because it would reduce the electricity consumption equal to the reduction by the power cut-off.