KATHMANDU: The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has started facing difficulty in importing electricity from India following rise in price of electricity in the Southern neighbor market.
As per NEA Spokesperson Suresh Bhattarai, price of electricity has risen by almost five times in India due to lack of coal and the global rise in price of petroleum products following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
After skyrocketing electricity price in the Indian market, Indian companies have bought power at a price higher than the ‘bid’ made by the NEA. As the result, NEA has not been able to import enough power from Indian energy market since last few days.
“We used to purchase electricity at IRs 5 per unit earlier. However, we are not getting electricity as required even when we were ready to pay IRs 15 per unit,” informed Kul Man Ghising, managing director at NEA.
The NEA has been currently procuring around 400 MW of electricity during the peak hours from India. However, India supplied electricity for only one hour on Wednesday and is expected to supply for three hours on Thursday.
After NEA could not import adequate energy, it has started cutting down electricity supply to industries. Factories located in the Birgunj-Pathlaiya industrial corridor faced power shortage on Wednesday after clanked to a stop on Wednesday after the Nepal Electricity Authority switched off the power because of a drop in imports from India.
Meanwhile, Ghising informed that this is a short-term crisis and there would be no load-shedding for industrial and regular consumers. “As this is a short-term crisis, we are committed to ensure supply even by purchasing electricity at higher rate with India,” said Ghising.
Ghising informed that NEA has placed a bid to purchase electricity at Rs 38 per unit in the Indian energy exchange and that Nepal is likely to get electricity as demanded from Friday.