Thursday, August 14, 2014: The North-Eastern region of India will not be hungry for power any more as the Centre has confirmed that NEEPCO is working to enhance power generation capacity by March 2017. The capacity will be increased from 1130 MW to 2057 MW, as detailed by Minister of State for Power, Coal and New and Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal.
The central generating stations (CGS) allocate 727 MW to Assam. In coming days, which is actually the remaining period of the 12th plan, the state is due to get around 827 MW of power (727 MW from CGSs and 100 MW from State Sector). All these details were provided by Goyal in a response to a question by Pankaj Bora in the Rajya Sabha. There are also several hydro projects in the region which will be commissioned soon, including Kameng (600 MW) Arunachal Pradesh (March 2017), Pare (110 MW) Arunachal Pradesh (Sept 2015) and Tuirial (60 MW) Mizoram (Dec 2015).
Several projects in the thermal sector are also in the queue to get commissioned and this list includes Tripura Gas Based Power Project (101 MW) Tripura (Nov 2014), Agartala Gas Turbine Power Plant CC Extension (51 MW) (March 2015) and Renewable Grid Interactive Solar Power Plant at TGBP site (5 MW) Tripura, Oct 2014.
In a separate response Goyal also reinstated that Power Finance Corporation is duly assisting state utilities and private sector units financially as they strive to undertake power projects which include hydro, transmission, urban distribution and many more in the North-Eastern region.
